Brain-aging gene discovered
The study was published online today in the journal Cell Systems . "If you look at a group of seniors, some will look older than their peers and some will look younger," said the study's co-leader Asa Abeliovich, PhD, professor of pathology and neurology in the Taub Institute for Alzheimer's Disease and the Aging Brain at CUMC. "The same differences in aging can be seen in the frontal cortex, the brain region responsible for higher mental processes. Our findings show that many of these differences are tied to variants of a gene called TMEM106B . People who have two 'bad' copies of this gene have a frontal cortex that, by various biological measures, appears 12 years older that those who have two normal copies." Studies have identified individual genes that increase one's risk for various neurodegenerative disorders, such as apolipoprotein E (APOE) for Alzheimer's disease. "But those genes explain only a small part of these diseas...