Open AccessCorrection: Genetic Evidence Implicates the Immune System and Cholesterol Metabolism in the Aetiology of Alzheimer's Disease
Author(s) -
Lesley Jones,
Peter Holmans,
Marian L. Hamshere,
Denise Harold,
Valentina Moskvina,
Dobril Ivanov,
Andrew Pocklington,
Richard Abraham,
Paul Hollingworth,
Rebecca Sims,
Amy Gerrish,
Jaspreet Singh Pahwa,
Nicola Jones,
Alexandra Stretton,
Angharad R. Morgan,
Simon Lovestone,
John Powell,
Petroula Proitsi,
Michelle K. Lupton,
Carol Brayne,
David C. Rubinsztein,
Michael Gill,
Brian Lawlor,
Aoibhinn Lynch,
Kevin Morgan,
Kristelle Brown,
Peter Passmore,
David Craig,
Bernadette McGuinness,
Stephen Todd,
Clive Holmes,
David Mann,
A. David Smith,
Seth Love,
Patrick Gavin Kehoe,
Simon Mead,
Nick C. Fox,
Martin N. Rossor,
John Collinge,
Wolfgang Maier,
Frank Jessen,
Britta SchÃ⁄rmann,
Hendrik van den Bussche,
Isabella Heuser,
Oliver Peters,
Johannes Kornhuber,
Jens Wiltfang,
Martin Dichgans,
Lutz Frölich,
Harald Hampel,
Michael E. Hall,
Dan Rujescu,
Alison Goate,
John Kauwe,
Carlos Cruchaga,
Petra Nowotny,
John C. Morris,
Kevin H. Mayo,
Gill Livingston,
Nicholas Bass,
Hugh Gurling,
Andrew McQuillin,
Rhian Gwilliam,
Panos Deloukas,
Ammar AlChalabi,
Christopher E. Shaw,
Andrew Singleton,
Rita Guerreiro,
Thomas W. MÃ⁄hleisen,
Markus M. Nöthen,
Susanne Moebus,
Karl-Heinz Jöckel,
Norman Klopp,
H.-Erich Wichmann,
Eckhard RÃ⁄ther,
Minerva M. Carrasquillo,
V. Shane Pankratz,
Steven G. Younkin,
John Hardy,
Michael O’Donovan,
Michael J. Owen,
Julie Williams
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/annotation/a0bb886d-d345-4a20-a82e-adce9b047798
Subject(s) - disease , etiology , immune system , bioinformatics , alzheimer's disease , medicine , biology , genetics
Late Onset Alzheimer's disease (LOAD) is the leading cause of dementia. Recent large genome-wide association studies (GWAS) identified the first strongly supported LOAD susceptibility genes since the discovery of the involvement of APOE in the early 1990s. We have now exploited these GWAS datasets to uncover key LOAD pathophysiological processes. We applied a recently developed tool for mining GWAS data for biologically meaningful information to a LOAD GWAS dataset. The principal findings were then tested in an independent GWAS dataset. We found a significant overrepresentation of association signals in pathways related to cholesterol metabolism and the immune response in both of the two largest genome-wide association studies for LOAD. Processes related to cholesterol metabolism and the innate immune response have previously been implicated by pathological and epidemiological studies of Alzheimer's disease, but it has been unclear whether those findings reflected primary aetiological events or consequences of the disease process. Our independent evidence from two large studies now demonstrates that these processes are aetiologically relevant, and suggests that they may be suitable targets for novel and existing therapeutic approaches.