BMC Seminar Thursday 2nd of May at 12:00 in room 343 Læknagarður

Speaker: Unnur Diljá Teitsdóttir, PhD student at Pétur Henry Petersen´s laboratory, Faculty of Medicine, Biomedical Center, University of Iceland

Title: Association of cerebrospinal fluid inflammatory biomarkers with Alzheimer‘s disease pathophysiology and cognition in an Icelandic memory clinic cohort

Abstract: In recent years, a paradigm shift has occurred from clinical to biological definition of Alzheimer´s disease with the main emphasis on AD pathology that starts decades before appearance of clinical symptoms. The core cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarkers reflecting the hallmarks of AD pathology, extracellular amyloid plaques (Aβ) and neurodegeneration (total tau and phosphorylated tau) have been at center of this change as they have been extensively studied.

 Although the diagnostic accuracies of these markers are quite high, the levels are relatively constant in the later stages of the disease and do not correlate well with progression of cognitive decline. This necessitates the need for exploration of novel biomarkers that help in better understanding different aspects of AD pathology and clinical expression.

Increasing evidence suggest inflammation as a potential contributing factor in onset and development of AD and other neurodegenerative diseases. Inflammation can be studied indirectly through the analysis of CSF, and several molecules have been proposed for this purpose. One of particular interest is YKL-40 (also known as chitinase-3-like-1 protein), a protein expressed by microglia and astrocytes in the brain. CSF YKL-40 has been shown to strongly correlate with CSF Neurofilament light (NFL), a protein mainly located in myelinated axons, indicating an association between glial activation and axonal injury. Other inflammatory proteins of interest are S100 calcium-binding protein B (S100B) and Glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP).

One of the objectives of the project was to estimate how these particular inflammatory CSF markers associated with CSF AD biomarkers and neuropsychological tests across different cognitive domains. Participants (n=58) were selected from the Memory Clinic Cohort of The Icelandic MCI study.