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Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Using Redescription Mining to Relate Clinical and Biological Characteristics of Cognitively Impaired and Alzheimer's Disease Patients. (arXiv:1702.06831v1 [q-bio.QM])

Based on a set of subjects and a collection of descriptors obtained from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative database, we use redescription mining to find rules revealing associations between these determinants which provides insights about the Alzheimer's disease (AD). We applied a four-step redescription mining algorithm (CLUS-RM), which has been extended to engender constraint-based redescription mining (CBRM) and enables several modes of targeted exploration of specific, user-defined associations. To a large extent we confirmed known findings, previously reported in the literature. However, several redescriptions contained biological descriptors that differentiated well between the groups and for which connection to AD is still not completely explained. Examples include testosterone, ciliary neurotrophic factor, brain natriuretic peptide, insulin etc. The imaging descriptor Spatial Pattern of Abnormalities for Recognition of Early AD and levels of leptin and angiopoietin-2 in plasma were also found to be remarkably good descriptors, that may provide better understanding of AD pathogenesis. Finally, the most intriguing and novel finding was the high association of the Pregnancy-Associated Protein-A (PAPP-A) with cognitive impairment in AD. The high importance of this finding lies in the fact that PAPP-A is a metalloproteinase, known to cleave insulin-like growth factor binding proteins. Since it also shares similar substrates with A Disintegrin and Metalloproteinase family of enzymes that act as {\alpha}-secretase to physiologically cleave amyloid precursor protein (APP) in the non-amyloidogenic pathway, it could be directly involved in metabolism of APP very early during the disease course. Therefore, further studies should investigate the role of PAPP-A in the development of AD more thoroughly.



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