Alzheimer & Parkinson

Sortilin (SORT1) is a lipoprotein receptor that shows genome-wide association with hypercholesterolaemia, explained by its ability to control hepatic output of lipoproteins. Although SORT1 also shows genome-wide association with Alzheimer disease and frontotemporal lobe dementia, the most prevalent forms of age-related dementias, sortilin's contribution to human brain lipid metabolism and health remains unclear. Here we show that sortilin mediates neuronal uptake of polyunsaturated fatty acids...

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) effectively treats drug-resistant neurological and psychiatric disorders, yet its mechanisms remain unclear. Here we show that high-frequency DBS of the subthalamic nucleus (STN), a common target for Parkinson's disease (PD), activates afferent axons while inhibiting STN neurons. These contrasting presynaptic and postsynaptic effects arise from a decrease in local neurotransmitter release with a larger decrease in glutamate than GABA, shifting the...

Biological aging clocks across organ systems and tissues have advanced understanding of human aging and disease. In this study, we expand this framework to develop seven magnetic resonance imaging-based multi-organ biological age gaps (MRIBAGs), including the brain, heart, liver, adipose tissue, spleen, kidney and pancreas. Using data from 313,645 individuals curated by the MULTI Consortium, we link the seven MRIBAGs to 2,923 plasma proteins, 327 metabolites and 6,477,810 common genetic...

No abstract

Endocytosis generates life-essential vesicles via complex protein-lipid machinery, yet its initiation mechanisms remain elusive. Long thought to require full machinery spatiotemporal coordination to drive the flat-to-round vesicle transformations, we reveal a notably simple initiation mechanism in neuroendocrine chromaffin cells involving only the final step, the pore closure. During calcium-triggered exocytosis, calcium activates the phosphatase synaptojanin, rapidly converting PI(4,5)P(2) to...

Neuroinflammation contributes to Alzheimer's disease (AD), but the molecules and pathways that initiate inflammation are unclear. In this issue of Immunity, Song et al. demonstrate that ZBP1-RIPK1 signaling in microglia can drive AD, wherein ZBP1 is activated by left-handed Z-DNA leaking from mitochondria, presenting new molecular targets for AD therapeutics.

In psychology and neuroscience, scientific questions are often framed in terms of mental activity (e.g., cognition, emotion, and perception); however, the brain is an organ with a particular function that only it can fulfill. Converging evidence suggests that this function is allostasis: the predictive regulation of competing demands from internal bodily systems. We review evidence for a distributed allostatic system that organizes whole-brain signaling, scaffolds psychological phenomena, and...

This systematic review investigates the timeline of Alzheimer's disease (AD)-like changes in the intracerebroventricular streptozotocin (ICV-STZ) rat model, a key tool for studying sporadic, non-genetic forms of AD. Following PRISMA guidelines, we analyzed 402 studies to characterize the progression of key pathological features, including cognitive deficits, insulin resistance, neurodegeneration, neuroinflammation, oxidative stress, tau pathology, amyloid aggregation, blood-brain barrier (BBB)...

Abnormal lipid metabolism is observed in Alzheimer's disease (AD), but its contribution to disease progression remains unclear. Genetic studies indicate that microglia, the brain's resident immune cells, influence lipid processing during AD. Here, we show that microglia-the brain's resident immune cells-selectively regulate lipid accumulation that associated with disease pathology in both AD mouse models and human postmortem brains. Using lipidomics and histological analysis, we identify a...

Parkinson's disease (PD) has long been considered an appropriate candidate for cell replacement therapy. We generated high-purity dopaminergic progenitors (A9-DPCs) from human embryonic stem cells and evaluated their safety and exploratory efficacy in a single-center, open-label, dose-escalation phase 1/2a trial (NCT05887466) for PD patients. Twelve patients with moderate-to-severe PD received bilateral putamen transplantation of low-dose (3.15 million cells; n = 6) or high-dose (6.30 million...

Galactocerebrosidase (GALC) is a lysosomal enzyme crucially involved in the catabolism of galactosphingolipids. Among galactosphingolipids, galactosylceramide and sulfatide are crucial determinants for oligodendrocyte differentiation, as well as myelin stability and structure. Homozygous or compound heterozygous inherited mutations leading to a severe decrease in GALC enzymatic activity have been associated with the onset of Krabbe disease, also known as "globoid cell leukodystrophy". Extensive...

The sensory motor cortex (SMC) plays a crucial role in motor function and is implicated in the pathophysiology of idiopathic Parkinson's disease (iPD). Asymmetric motor symptomatology in iPD suggests lateralized neurochemical alterations that may underlie disease progression and severity. Single-voxel in vivo proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy using PRESS (20 × 20 × 20 mm³) and MEGA-PRESS (30 × 30 × 30 mm3) sequences were performed on bilateral SMC in 25 iPD patients and 23 healthy controls...

Biological phenotypes emerge from complex interactions across molecular layers. Yet, data-driven approaches to infer these regulatory networks have primarily focused on single-omic studies, overlooking inter-layer regulatory relationships. To address these limitations, we developed MINIE, a computational method that integrates multi-omic data from bulk metabolomics and single-cell transcriptomics through a Bayesian regression approach that explicitly models the timescale separation between...

Chaperone-mediated autophagy (CMA) declines in ageing and neurodegenerative diseases. Loss of CMA in neurons leads to neurodegeneration and behavioural changes in mice but the role of CMA in neuronal physiology is largely unknown. Here we show that CMA deficiency causes neuronal hyperactivity, increased seizure susceptibility and disrupted calcium homeostasis. Pre-synaptic neurotransmitter release and NMDA receptor-mediated transmission were enhanced in CMA-deficient females, whereas males...

Liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) and subsequent liquid-gel/solid transition are considered common aggregation mechanisms of proteins linked to neurodegenerative diseases. α-synuclein (α-syn), the main factor in Parkinson's disease pathology, has been reported to undergo LLPS, thereby accelerating aggregate formation. However, the precise molecular events involved in the early stages of α-syn aggregation remain controversial. In this study, we show that α-syn aggregation is promoted by...

Age and APOE ε4 are major risk factors for Alzheimer's disease (AD), while sex differences exist in disease prevalence and progression. Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) proteomics can provide additional insights into brain aging and AD. To examine proteomic changes due to age, sex and apolipoprotein E (APOE) ε4 along with amyloid status before clinical AD occurs, we profiled 6,175 proteins in the CSF from 994 cognitively normal individuals aged 43-91 years. We identified and replicated 2,172...

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Mitochondrial control of cell death is of central importance to disease mechanisms from cancer to neurodegeneration. Mitochondrial anchored protein ligase (MAPL) is an outer mitochondrial membrane small ubiquitin-like modifier ligase that is a key determinant of cell survival, yet how MAPL controls the fate of this process remains unclear. Combining genome-wide functional genetic screening and cell biological approaches, we found that MAPL induces pyroptosis through an inflammatory pathway...

As Alzheimer's disease (AD) is diagnosed more frequently in women, understanding the role of sex has become a key priority in AD research. However, despite aging being the primary risk factor for AD, it remains unclear whether men and women differ in the extent of brain decline with age. Using 12,638 longitudinal brain MRIs from 4,726 participants aged 17 to 95 y across 14 cohorts, we examined sex differences in structural brain changes over time, controlling for differences in head size. Men...

Alzheimer's disease (AD)-the leading cause of dementia-has no cure, inadequate treatment options, and a limited understanding of prevention measures. We have previously shown that perinatal dietary supplementation with the nutrient choline ameliorates cognitive deficits and reduces amyloidosis across the brain in App^(NL-G-F) AD model mice. Here, we analyzed transcriptomic abnormalities in these mice and tested the hypothesis that they may be attenuated by perinatal choline supplementation...