United States: Science investigators found alcohol use disorder (AUD) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) to have comparable topographical patterns of changes in gene expression, suggesting that alcohol may cause the acceleration of Alzheimer’s disease.
More about the finding
The team unlocked which genes were turned on or off in single cells in the brains of people with the two disorders, and they discovered similarities in alterations of inflammation, cell signaling, and blood vessel activity in both.
The present study raises AUD as a possible exacerbating condition for AD, and its results may open up new therapeutic avenues.
Alcohol can be said to be a critical subject in Alzheimer’s disease prevention and management, and the research supports this.
Subsequent research intends to replicate the findings when employing larger AUD databases.
Alzheimer’s disease expanse
Research has found that the major causes of AD include aging as well as genetic factors, but here, the level of alcohol drinking has also been discovered to play a role through epidemiological research.
Now, Scripps Research scientists have demonstrated that something as simple as alcohol use is tied to the same changes in gene expression profiles in the brain as Alzheimer’s, which should help to explain why alcohol use accelerates Alzheimer’s.
The results could help shape prevention and treatment approaches of the future, according to the study published in eNeuro on September 19, 2024.
According to senior author Pietro Paolo Sanna, MD, a professor in the Immunology and Microbiology Department at Scripps Research, “We found several cell-type-specific genes and pathways that are dysregulated in both Alzheimer’s disease and alcohol, which supports the hypothesis that alcohol use disorder can accelerate Alzheimer’s disease progression by impinging on some of the same molecular mechanisms that are affected by Alzheimer’s,” neurosciencenews.com reported.
“By understanding these dysregulations with this level of molecular detail, we can understand what’s causing these diseases, and we can also identify targets that could be used therapeutically,” Sanna added.
This is the first study to use single-cell transcriptomics, which measures gene expression at the cellular level by sequencing RNA, to look at the effects of Alzheimer’s disease and AUD in different populations of brain cells within humans.