Neurodevelopment and neural environment inform Alzheimer's disease age at onset and phenotype

Risk factors associated with sporadic non-amnestic and early-onset Alzheimer's disease (AD) remain underexamined.

We investigated a large, clinically heterogeneous, AD cohort for frequencies of established risk factors (hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, diabetes mellitus) alongside novel factors (non-right-handedness, learning disability, seizures, autoimmune disease).

Early-onset AD possessed lower frequencies of established risk factors (hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, diabetes mellitus, all p < 0.001) and higher frequencies of novel factors (non-right-handedness, learning disability, active seizure, all p < 0.001; remote seizure, p = 0.002; and autoimmune disease, p = 0.007). An age at onset < 70 maximally distinguished novel from typical factors. Principal component analysis loaded novel factors into two components, non-right-handedness and learning disability versus seizure and autoimmune disease, which combined, resulted in an exponential decrease in age at onset from one factor alone.

Identifying novel factors enriched in early-onset and non-amnestic AD introduces new theories of AD susceptibility and phenotypic heterogeneity, with significant implications for disease prediction and treatment.

We identified a suite of novel factors overrepresented in early-onset and non-amnestic AD. These factors can be broadly conceptualized as neurodevelopmental (non-right-handedness and learning disability) and neural environmental (seizure and autoimmunity). The combination of these factors produced exponential decreases in AD age at onset, compared to each alone, supporting a new theoretical framework for understanding AD risk with implications for disease prediction, prevention, and therapeutic intervention.