Approved Research

The impact of APOE genotype and obesity overt cognition and brain changes along the life-span

Lay summary

Alzheimer disease (AD) is a devastating illness with dramatically effect in our elderly. It is till unclear what are the causes of the disease. Nevertheless, several studies have report that there exist some risk factors that might contribute to develop the disease. Two of them are the apolipoprotein gene  (APOE) and obesity. On the one hand, APOE is a gene which, depending on their genotype, increase by x4-16 the risk of developing dementia. On the other hand, several studies have report the association between obesity and the appearance of dementia. Nonetheless, no previous study have investigated the interaction between both risk factors along the life-span. Concretely, in the present study, we will evaluate how cognitive performance and different brain morphological metrics change along the life-span, taking into consideration the obesity and APOE status of the participants. During the total of 20 months that we expect to invest in this project, we aim to disentangle the effect alone and/or in combination to these two factor in AD. Such findings will have strong implications in the proposal of novel and more personalized clinical trials to tackle this devastating disease.