Preserved neurogenesis in non-demented individuals with AD neuropathology.

Rare individuals remain cognitively intact despite the presence of neuropathology usually associated with fully symptomatic Alzheimer's disease (AD), which we refer to as Non-Demented with Alzheimer's disease Neuropathology (NDAN). Understanding the involved mechanism(s) of their cognitive resistance may reveal novel strategies to treat AD-related dementia. In the pursuit of this goal, we determined the number of hippocampal neural stem cells (NSCs) and investigated the expression of several miRNAs in NDAN and AD subjects.

Saliva sampling in global clinical studies: the impact of low sampling volume on performance of DNA in downstream genotyping experiments.

Background: The collection of viable DNA samples is an essential element of any genetics research programme. Biological samples for DNA purification are now routinely collected in many studies with a variety of sampling methods available. Initial observation in this study suggested a reduced genotyping success rate of some saliva derived DNA samples when compared to blood derived DNA samples prompting further investigation.

Case-control single-marker and haplotypic association analysis of pedigree data.

Related individuals collected for use in linkage studies may be used in case-control linkage disequilibrium analysis, provided one takes into account correlations between individuals due to identity-by-descent (IBD) sharing. We account for these correlations by calculating a weight for each individual. The weights are used in constructing a composite likelihood, which is maximized iteratively to form likelihood ratio tests for single-marker and haplotypic associations.