Impaired Pathways of Detoxification and Risk of Alzheimer’s Disease in Humans - Differential Gene Expression Studies via Gene Set Expression Analysis

Background

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is an all-too-common dementing disease associated with aging, impacting individuals, their families, and society. No specific etiology has been determined despite extensive research over the last century.

Objective

Detoxification is a multifaceted systemic process of variable efficacy that eliminates potentially hazardous exogenous and endogenous substances from the body. Multiple genes responsible for detoxification have been previously identified.

Methods

Utilizing gene set expression analysis, this paper reports two differential gene expression studies comparing AD and non-AD cohorts, first in a Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) dataset study and second in a tissue RNA-seq study.

Results

We identified several detoxification genes with statistically significant differential expression in AD compared to non-AD samples in both phases of this study.

Conclusions

This set of findings suggests a possible etiologic association of impaired detoxification and AD. Subsequent research to follow up on these findings is needed.

Graphical abstract