Alcoholism and Alzheimer's

A new study has shown that some "alcoholism genes" coincide with genes predisposing to Alzheimer's disease

Marina Astvatsaturyan, Echo of Moscow

Some genetic risk factors for alcohol-related disorders also turn out to be risk factors for neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, The Scientist (Genes for Alcohol Use Disorder and Alzheimer's Risk Overlap: Study) reports, citing an article published in Nature Communications (Kapoor et al., Multi-omics integration analysis identifies novel genes for alcoholism with potential overlap with neurodegenerative diseases).

In recent years, several studies have been published in which sections of the genome containing 10 or more genes that affect the individual risk of alcoholism have been identified. In a study published by Manav Kapoor from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York (Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai) and his colleagues, evidence was obtained that the immune system of people suffering from alcoholism may be overactive.

But this discovery has raised new questions, and one of them is: does excessive alcohol consumption directly cause immune dysfunction, or do the genetic characteristics of some people cause the risk of both? And besides, it was interesting to find out whether there are genetic differences between people who consume a large amount of alcohol, but do not have a diagnosis of "alcohol use disorder", and those who have been diagnosed with alcoholism.

To answer these questions, Kapoor and co-authors analyzed genetic data from 700,000 families collected in the American project on the Genetics of Alcoholism (Collaborative Studies on the Genetics of Alcoholism), as well as genetic variants and information on weekly alcohol consumption stored in the UK Biobank database. All this was compared with data on the level of mRNA in adult and embryonic brain samples, which allow us to judge the degree of activity of certain genes, as well as data on the epigenetic suppression of some of them.

So many genes associated with alcohol consumption have been identified, but scientists have chosen for a more detailed study two associated with excessive consumption and in a previous study found a link with neurodegenerative diseases. One of these genes (SPI1) regulated the activity of immune system cells, and the other (MAPT) was responsible for the production of tau protein in neurons of the central nervous system. Tau protein plays a significant role in the development of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, as well as frontotemporal dementia. How it is related to alcohol abuse is still unclear. 

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