A MicroRNA Signature of Cognitive Decline

An enormous amount of data can be derived from analysis of the cells and molecules found in a blood sample. Researchers will be kept busy for decades yet, ever more fficiently gathering and mining this data, in search of ways to assess the progression of aging and specific age-related diseases. The work here is interesting for finding a correlation between the abundance of a small number of microRNA molecules and age-related cognitive decline. Many microRNAs are promiscuously involved in the regulation of important cellular pathways, altering the expression levels of proteins that are themselves important the regulation of cell activities. Evolution finds new uses for existing molecules, and the microRNA layer of gene expression is a good example of this principle. The establishment of effective therapies for age-associated neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) is still challenging because pathology accumulates long before there are any clinical signs of disease. Thus, patients are often only diagnosed at an already advanced state of molecular pathology, when causative therapies fail. Therefore, there is an urgent need for molecular biomarkers that are (i) minimally invasive, (ii) can inform about individual disease risk, and (iii) ideally indicate the presence of multiple pathologies. Such biomarkers should eventually be applicable in the context of routine screening approaches with the aim to detect individuals at risk for developing AD that c...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs