Genetics of Alzheimer’s disease: an East Asian perspective

East Asian populations

GWASs have been performed worldwide to identify common genetic factors that can explain clinical phenotypes, wherein the association between all autosomal SNPs, which are mainly genotyped by SNP arrays, and phenotypes are evaluated. The most recent GWAS for AD was performed in a European population, including 1,126,563 individuals and identified 38 susceptibility loci [7]. It is essential to perform GWASs using samples from each ethnic population to identify race-specific AD susceptibility loci. To date, 7 GWASs have been conducted in East Asians with samples from Japan, China and South Korea, and they have identified 26 AD associated loci (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Overview of the genetic loci reported by seven GWAS in East Asian population. Note that the neighbor genes of each SNP shown below are mapped to GENCODE Release 39 (GRCh38.p13) based on rs numbers and may…

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