Association of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease with germline-generated high affinity self-antigen load

• Published in: Translational psychiatry Vol. 10; no. 1; p. 146
• Main Authors: Huang, Poyin, Yang, Yuan-Han, Chang, Ya-Hsuan, Chang, Shu-Ling, Chou, Mei-Chuan, Lai, Chiou-Lian, Liu, Ching-Kuan, Chen, Hsuan-Yu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 12.05.2020; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: 45; 45/23; 631/208/2489; 631/378/340; 692/420/2489; Alzheimer's disease; Antigens; Behavioral Sciences; Biological Psychology; Medicine; Medicine & Public Health; Mutation; Neurosciences; Pharmacotherapy; Psychiatry
• ISSN: 2158-3188; 2158-3188
• DOI: 10.1038/s41398-020-0826-6

Self-antigen presentation outside the central nervous system has crucial role regarding self-proteins tolerance and autoimmunity, leading to neuroinflammation. Self-antigen with strong-binding affinity is considered to be pathogenic. We aim to investigate whether strong-binding affinity self-antigen load is associated with early/late-onset Alzheimer’s disease (AD). A total of 54 AD samples (22 early-onset, 32 late-onset) underwent next-generation sequencing (NGS) for whole-exome sequencing. Genotypes of HLA class I genes and germline mutations were obtained for estimation of the binding affinity and number of self-antigens. For each patient, self-antigen load was estimated by adding up the number of self-antigens with strong-binding affinity. Self-antigen load of early-onset AD was significantly higher than late-onset AD (mean ± SD: 6115 ± 2430 vs 4373 ± 2492; p  = 0.011). An appropriate cutoff value 2503 for dichotomizing self-antigen load was obtained by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis. Patients were then dichotomized into high or low self-antigen load groups in the binary multivariate logistic regression analysis. Adjusted odds ratio of the high self-antigen load (>2503) was 14.22 (95% CI, 1.22–165.70; p  = 0.034) after controlling other covariates including gender, education, ApoE status, and baseline CDR score. This is the first study using NGS to investigate germline mutations generated self-antigen load in AD. As strong-binding affinity self-antigen is considered to be pathogenic in neuroinflammation, our finding indicated that self-antigen load did have a role in the pathogenesis of AD owing to its association with neuroinflammation. This finding may also contribute to further research regarding disease mechanism and development of novel biomarkers or treatment.