Revealing the correlations between brain cortical characteristics and susceptibility genes for Alzheimer disease: a cross-sectional study.

Background: Alzheimer disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease closely related to genes and characterized by the atrophy of the cerebral cortex. Correlations between imaging phenotypes and the susceptibility genes for AD, as demonstrated in the findings of genome-wide association studies (GWASs), still need to be addressed due to the complicated structure of the human cortex.

Methods: In our study, an improved GWAS method, whole cortex characteristics GWAS (WCC-GWAS), was proposed. The WCC-GWAS uses multiple cortex characteristics of gray-matter volume (GMV), cortical thickness (CT), cortical surface area (CSA), and local gyrification index (LGI). A cohort of 496 participants was enrolled and divided into 4 groups: normal control (NC; n=122), early mild cognitive impairment (EMCI; n=196), late mild cognitive impairment (LMCI; n=62), and AD (n=116). Based on the Desikan-Killiany atlas, the brain was parcellated into 68 brain regions, and the WCC of each brain region was individually calculated. Four cortex characteristics of GMV, CT, CSA, and LGI across the 4 groups optimized with multiple comparisons and the ReliefF algorithm were taken as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain phenotypes. Under the model of multiple linear additive genetic regression, the correlations between the MRI brain phenotypes and single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were deduced.

Results: The findings identified 2 prominent correlations. First, rs7309929 of neuron navigator 3 () located on chromosome 12 correlated with the decreased GMV for the left middle temporal gyrus (P=0.0074). Second, rs11250992 of long intergenic non-protein-coding RNA 700 () located on chromosome 10 correlated with the decreased CT for the left supramarginal gyrus (P=0.0019).

Conclusions: The findings suggested that the correlations between phenotypes and genotypes could be effectively evaluated. The strategy of extracting MRI phenotypes as endophenotypes provided valuable indications in AD GWAS.