Alzheimer's disease (Alzheimer's disease) is progressive brain disease that affects cognition, memory and behavior.
TDP-43 limbic-predominantly age-related encephalopathy (LATE) is a recently defined common neurodegenerative disorder that mimics the clinical symptoms of Alzheimer's disease.
LATE is a very common condition, typically it affects one third of people older than 75 years of age. This is in contrast to Alzheimer's disease pathology, which tends to level off and perhaps decrease in prevalence among persons beyond age 85 years.
TDP-43 is the major disease protein found in frontotemporal dementia and in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
At present, the risk factors involved in LATE and those that differentiate it from Alzheimer's disease are largely unknown.
Managing cardiovascular risk factors, maintaining an active lifestyle, and eating a balanced diet are associated with a reduced risk of AD or a lower rate of cognitive decline. Alcohol consumption is widespread and socially encouraged and is rarely associated with neurodegenerative diseases.
However, alcoholism leads to brain atrophy, and long-term alcohol use can damage almost every organ and system in the body.
Authors of a new article used an algorithmic approach to identify important factors that distinguish patients with LATE and/or Alzheimer's disease from controls with significantly imbalanced data.
They analyzed two ROSMAP and NACC datasets and found that lifetime alcohol consumption was one of the most important lifestyle and environmental factors associated with LATE and Alzheimer's disease, and that their associations varied. In particular, the authors identified a specific subpopulation consisting of APOE-e4 carriers.
The authors found that for this subpopulation, light to moderate alcohol consumption was a protective factor against Alzheimer's disease and LATE, but its protective function against Alzheimer's disease appeared to be stronger than LATE.
The codes for authors' algorithms will be (hopefully) available at https://github.com/xinxingwu-uk/PFV.