Researchers Classify People With Alzheimer's Into 6 Subgroups

A study published in Molecular Psychiatry details an approach for classifying people with Alzheimer's that could help in the development of personalized treatments, reports UW Medicine . University of Washington (UW) School of Medicine Professor Shubhabrata Mukherjee led a team that placed 4,050 people with late-onset Alzheimer's into six groups based on their cognitive functioning at the time of diagnosis. The team then applied genetic data to identify biological differences across these groups. Participants were assigned cognitive scores in the domains of memory, executive functioning, language, and visuospatial functioning. The largest group had scores in all four domains that were fairly consistent, while the next largest group had memory scores that were substantially lower than their other scores. Smaller groups scored substantially lower in language, visuospatial, and executive functioning than in the other domains. Six percent had two domains that were substantially lower than their other scores. Genetic data analysis uncovered 33 single nucleotide polymorphisms in which the genetic association was very strong for one of the subgroups, as well as a strong relationship between a specific variant of the APOE gene and risk for the memory loss subgroup.