Hippocampal transcriptome-guided genetic analysis of correlated episodic memory phenotypes in Alzheimer's disease

As the most common type of dementia, Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder initially manifested by impaired memory performances. While the diagnosis information indicates a dichotomous status of a patient, memory scores have the potential to capture the continuous nature of the disease progression and may provide more insights into the underlying mechanism. In this work, we performed a targeted genetic study of memory scores on an AD cohort to identify the associations between a set of genes highly expressed in the hippocampal region and seven cognitive scores related to episodic memory. Both main effects and interaction effects of the targeted genetic markers on these correlated memory scores were examined. In addition to well-known AD genetic markers APOE and TOMM40, our analysis identified a new risk gene NAV2 through the gene-level main effect analysis. NAV2 was found to be significantly and consistently associated with all seven episodic memory scores. Genetic interaction analysis also yielded a few promising hits warranting further investigation, especially for the RAVLT list B Score.