Molecular Signatures Underlying Selective Regional Vulnerability to Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia, characterized by progressive cognitive impairment and neurodegeneration as a result of abnormal neuronal loss. To elucidate the molecular systems associated with AD, we characterized the gene expression changes associated with multiple clinical and neuropathological traits in 1,053 postmortem brain samples across 19 brain regions from 125 persons dying with varying severities of dementia and variable AD-neuropathology severities. 125 human brains were accessed from the Mount Sinai/JJ Peters VA Medical Center Brain Bank (MSBB). This brain resource was assembled after applying stringent inclusion/exclusion criteria and represents the full spectrum of clinical and neuropathological disease severity in the absence of discernable non-AD neuropathology. RNA samples from 19 brain regions isolated from the 125 MSBB specimens were collected and profiled using Affymetrix Genechip microarrays. There were 50 to 60 subjects per brain region with varying degrees of AD pathological abnormalities.