Research Paper Volume 12, Issue 12 pp 12019—12031
APOE ε4 allele accelerates age-related multi-cognitive decline and white matter damage in non-demented elderly
- 1 Department of Neurology, The Affiliated Hospital of Qingdao University, Qingdao, China
- 2 State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
- 3 BABRI Centre, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
- 4 Department of Neurology, and Fujian Key Laboratory of Molecular Neurology, Fujian Medical University Union Hospital, Fuzhou, China
- 5 Banner Alzheimer's Institute, Phoenix, AZ 85006, USA
- 6 Institute of Basic Research in Clinical Medicine, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, Beijing, China
Received: February 8, 2020 Accepted: May 1, 2020 Published: June 22, 2020
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.103367How to Cite
Copyright © 2020 Sun et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Advanced age and apolipoprotein E (APOE) ε4 allele are both associated with increased risk of the Alzheimer’s disease (AD). However, the extent of the joint contribution of APOE ε4 allele and age on the brain white matter integrity, cognition and their relationship are unclear. We assessed the age-related variation differences of major cognitions in 846 non-demented elderly, and brain major white matter tracts in an MRI sub-cohort of 111 individuals between ε4 carriers and noncarriers. We found that: (i) carriers showed a steeper age-related decline after age 50 in general mental status, attention, language, and executive function and performed worse than noncarriers at almost all ages; (ii) main effect of age on anterior fibers, but main effect of APOE ε4 on posterior fibers, and the interactive effect of them existed on anterior and posterior fibers; (iii) carriers showed an accelerated age-related integrity reduction of these fibers compared to noncarriers who had a slight decrease but not significant; and (iv) significant associations of the higher white matter integrity with better multi-cognitive performance in old ε4 carriers. Overall, combining APOE status with age may be useful in assessing possible mechanisms of disease development in AD.