The largest study of its kind has unveiled new insights into how genes are regulated in dementia, including discovering 84 new genes linked to the disease.
Led by the University of Exeter, the international collaboration combined and analysed data from more than 1,400 people across six different studies, in a meta-analysis published in Nature Communications. These studies had used brain samples from people who had died with Alzheimer’s disease. The project, funded by Alzheimer’s Society and supported by the Medical Research Council and the National Institutes for Health, looked at an epigenetic mark called DNA methylation at nearly half a million sites in the genome. Epigenetic processes control the extent to which genes are switched on and off, meaning they behave differently as needed across the different cell-types and tissues that make up a human body. Importantly, unlike our…
