Alzheimers- Protein That Predicts Alzheimer’s Also Predicts HIV Progression

Researchers from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, along with colleagues in Maryland and California, said the new study provides more conclusive evidence of a link for the protein, called apoE4, to infectious diseases, namely HIV.

The report is in this week’s online Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research team studied a population of 1,300 European and African-American HIV-infected patients. The scientists compared HIV clinical outcomes of individuals who have two copies of the gene that makes the apoE4 protein with outcomes of those endowed with two copies of a gene that makes a related protein, apoE3. The latter differs from apoE4 by a single amino acid.

They found the subjects with two copies of apoE4 were more likely to have a twofold faster HIV disease course, noticeably marked by progression to death, than subjects with two copies that make apoE3.

“The prevailing view is that apoE4 plays a role only in non-infectious diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease , but we found clear evidence to the contrary,” said study co-author Sunil K. Ahuja, M.D., professor of medicine, microbiology, immunology and biochemistry at the UT Health Science Center and director of the Veterans Administration Research Center for AIDS and HIV-1 Infection in the South Texas Veterans Health Care System.

“These findings are very exciting because there are major efforts under way to find small molecules that make apoE4 more like apoE3,” said Hemant Kulkarni, M.D., a co-author from the UT Health Science Center.

“Such therapies might have application not only in Alzheimer’s disease but also HIV disease,” said Matthew Dolan, M.D., a co-author from Wilford Hall Medical Center in San Antonio and a long-term collaborator of Dr. Ahuja.

Paper co-authors are Dr. Ahuja, Dr. Kulkarni, and Weijing He, M.D.; of the Health Science Center, and Dr. Dolan; Brian Agan, M.D.; and Vincent Marconi, M.D., of Wilford Hall Medical Center and the Infectious Diseases Clinical Research Program of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, Md. They performed the research with colleagues Robert W. Mahley, M.D., Ph.D., of the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, and Trevor Burt, M.D., and Joseph M. McCune, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of California, San Francisco.

About Alzheimer’s Disease

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a slowly progressive disease of the brain that is characterized by impairment of memory and eventually by disturbances in reasoning, planning, language, and perception. Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia, which afflicts 24 million people worldwide. Alzheimer’s disease is not a normal part of aging and is not something that inevitably happens in later life. It is rarely seen before the age of 65. The likelihood of having Alzheimer’s disease increases substantially after the age of 70 and may affect around 50% of persons over the age of 85.

By: Jeff Behar

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