0000000000053899
AUTHOR
John Collinge
The cognitive profile of prion disease: a prospective clinical and imaging study
Objectives Prion diseases are dementing illnesses with poorly defined neuropsychological features. This is probably because the most common form, sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, is often rapidly progressive with pervasive cognitive decline making detailed neuropsychological investigation difficult. This study, which includes patients with inherited, acquired (iatrogenic and variant) and sporadic forms of the disease, is the only large-scale neuropsychological investigation of this patient group ever undertaken and aimed to define a neuropsychological profile of human prion diseases. Methods A tailored short cognitive examination of all of the patients (n = 81), with detailed neuropsycho…
A second family with familial AD and the V717L APP mutation has a later age at onset
Four mutations have been reported at the 717 codon of the amyloid precursor protein (APP), with valine substituted by isoleucine, glycine, phenylalanine, and leucine. While several families with the isoleucine substitution have been described, the other substitutions have been reported in only one family each worldwide. A family with the V717L APP mutation has been previously reported,1 with a mean age at onset of 38 years (range 35 to 39), based on four affected family members, and a mean age at death of 46 years (range 40 to 50). We have identified a second family with a later mean age at onset of 50 years (range 48 to 57) and mean age at death of 61 years (range 57 to 68). Family 171 is …
Distinct neuropsychological profiles correspond to distribution of cortical thinning in inherited prion disease caused by insertional mutation
Background The human prion diseases are a group of universally fatal neurodegenerative disorders associated with the auto-catalytic misfolding of the normal cell surface prion protein (PrP). Mutations causative of inherited human prion disease (IPD) include an insertion of six additional octapeptide repeats (6-OPRI) and a missense mutation (P102L) with large families segregating for each mutation residing in southern England. Here we report for the first time the neuropsychological and clinical assessments in these two groups. Method The cognitive profiles addressing all major domains were obtained for 26 patients (18 6-OPRI, 8 P102L) and the cortical thickness determined using 1.5T MRI in …
Rare coding variants in PLCG2, ABI3, and TREM2 implicate microglial-mediated innate immunity in Alzheimer's disease
International audience; We identified rare coding variants associated with Alzheimer's disease in a three-stage case-control study of 85,133 subjects. In stage 1, we genotyped 34,174 samples using a whole-exome microarray. In stage 2, we tested associated variants (P < 1 × 10-4) in 35,962 independent samples using de novo genotyping and imputed genotypes. In stage 3, we used an additional 14,997 samples to test the most significant stage 2 associations (P < 5 × 10-8) using imputed genotypes. We observed three new genome-wide significant nonsynonymous variants associated with Alzheimer's disease: a protective variant in PLCG2 (rs72824905: p.Pro522Arg, P = 5.38 × 10-10, odds ratio (OR) = 0.68…
Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in an Italian woman.
Summary As of May, 2002, 128 cases of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob (vCJD) disease have been identified in the UK, France, and Ireland. We report the first case of vCJD in Italy. The patient was a young Italian woman who had never travelled to a country with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). She was diagnosed by cerebral MRI and western blot analysis of tonsil biopsy samples. The results of these analyses suggest that vCJD in continental Europe and the UK share genetic, clinical, and neuroimaging features, with similar western blot patterns. The identification of vCJD in Italy could have important implications for public-health policy decisions and clinical surveillance in Italy and other…
The neuropsychology of variant CJD: a comparative study with inherited and sporadic forms of prion disease.
Objective: To assess cognitive function in variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD). We describe the neuropsychological profiles of 10 cases and compare these data with cross sectional data obtained from patients with histologically confirmed sporadic CJD and cases with inherited prion disease with confirmed mutations in the prion protein gene. Methods: Patients referred to the Specialist Cognitive Disorders Clinic at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery and the National Prion Clinic at St Mary's Hospital, London for further investigation of suspected CJD were recruited into the study. The neuropsychological test battery evaluated general intelligence, visual and verbal memo…