A research partially funded by the EU has uncovered new information linking healthy ageing and neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer's disease.

An international team of researchers partially funded by the EU has uncovered new information linking healthy ageing and neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer's disease. The research was supported in part by the CLIP project ('Mapping functional protein-RNA (ribonucleic acid) interactions to identify new targets for oligonucleotide-based therapy'), which is supported by a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant worth €900,000 under the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). Besides, the 2011 Starting Grant has been opened for applications.

The research is based in a assessment and comparison of changes in gene expression linked with ageing and diseases in a region of the brain that experts say is affected in both Alzheimer's and FTLD. They compared samples from healthy subjects, aged between 16 and 102, with samples from diseased subjects. The researchers identified similar changes in gene expression patterns linked to ageing and neurodegenerative diseases. The researchers discovered differences between gene expression in the normal ageing brain and expression in Alzheimer's and FTLD. This was especially evident in the patterns of alternative splicing, where parts of an RNA molecule are arranged differently to adjust the message. During the normal ageing process, genes linked to cellular metabolism were primarily affected by changes in alternative splicing. Disease-specific changes were linked to neuron-specific genes. Changes in the expression of a number of genes coding for RNA binding proteins were observed, which, the team says, may explain some of the observed alterations in splicing.

According to the researchers, this study will lead to further work on normal ageing and neurodegenerative disease. Moreover, the findings also indicate that studies of neurodegenerative diseases might help to understand how to delay the changes that take place in healthy individuals at an advanced age.