Global and local ancestry in African-Americans: Implications for Alzheimer's disease risk.

  • Hohman TJ, Cooke-Bailey JN, Reitz C, Jun G, Naj A, Beecham GW, Liu Z, Carney RM, Vance JM, Cuccaro ML, Rajbhandary R, Vardarajan BN, Wang LS, Valladares O, Lin CF, Larson EB, Graff-Radford NR, Evans D, De Jager PL, Crane PK, Buxbaum JD, Murrell JR, Raj T, Ertekin-Taner N, Logue MW, Baldwin CT, Green RC, Barnes LL, Cantwell LB, Fallin MD, Go RC, Griffith P, Obisesan TO, Manly JJ, Lunetta KL, Kamboh MI, Lopez OL, Bennett DA, Hardy J, Hendrie HC, Hall KS, Goate AM, Lang R, Byrd GS, Kukull WA, Foroud TM, Farrer LA, Martin ER, Pericak-Vance MA, Schellenberg GD, Mayeux R, Haines JL, Thornton-Wells TA. Global and local ancestry in African-Americans: Implications for Alzheimer's disease risk. Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association. 2016 Mar;12(12). 233-43. PMID: 26092349 [PubMed] PMCID: PMC4681680

Abstract

African-American (AA) individuals have a higher risk for late-onset Alzheimer's disease (LOAD) than Americans of primarily European ancestry (EA). Recently, the largest genome-wide association study in AAs to date confirmed that six of the Alzheimer's disease (AD)-related genetic variants originally discovered in EA cohorts are also risk variants in AA; however, the risk attributable to many of the loci (e.g., APOE, ABCA7) differed substantially from previous studies in EA. There likely are risk variants of higher frequency in AAs that have not been discovered.