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Washington University in St. Louis

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APOE

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Full-Text Articles in Medicine and Health Sciences

The Role Of Apolipoprotein E In Alzheimer Disease: From Therapy To Mechanism, Tien-Phat Vuong Huynh May 2020

The Role Of Apolipoprotein E In Alzheimer Disease: From Therapy To Mechanism, Tien-Phat Vuong Huynh

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder associated with irreversible damage to the brain, which manifests in cognitive dysfunction, memory loss, and eventual death. The pathological hallmarks of AD are amyloid plaques, which are cerebral aggregates consisting of fibrils of the amyloid β-protein (Aβ), and filamentous lesions of the microtubule-associated protein tau known as neurofibrillary tangles. In the early 1990s, the apolipoprotein E (apoE) was found to co-localize with amyloid plaques. The ε4 allele of the APOE gene was sequentially identified as the strongest genetic risk factor for AD, increasing the risk by 4 – 12-fold, whereas the ε2 allele …


The Role Of Apolipoprotein E In Regulating Tau Pathogenesis And Neurodegeneration In A Tauopathy Mouse Model, Yang Shi Dec 2018

The Role Of Apolipoprotein E In Regulating Tau Pathogenesis And Neurodegeneration In A Tauopathy Mouse Model, Yang Shi

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

APOE4 is the strongest genetic risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer's disease (AD). APOE4 increases brain amyloid-β (Aβ) pathology relative to other APOE isoforms. However, whether APOE independently influences tau pathology, the other pathological hallmark of AD and other tauopathies, or tau-mediated neurodegeneration, is not clear. By generating P301S tau transgenic mice on either a human APOE knock in (KI) or APOE knockout (KO) background, we show that the presence of human APOE, regardless of APOE isoforms, leads to various degrees of brain atrophy in 9-month old P301S mice, whereas APOE ablation strongly protects against neurodegeneration. In particular, P301S/E4 mice develop …