The Potential of Neurogranin as a Prognostic Biomarker for Alzheimer’s Disease
Alzheimer's is a type of dementia that causes problems with memory, thinking and behavior. Symptoms usually develop slowly and get worse over time, becoming severe enough to interfere with daily tasks, it is the most common cause of dementia, accounting for 60 percent to 80 percent of dementia cases. Alzheimer's disease is the sixth-leading cause of death in the United States, and the fifth-leading cause of death among those age 65 and older. It also is a leading cause of disability and poor health
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ynaptic dysfunction is linked to cognitive symptoms in Alzheimer’s disease. Thus, measurement of synapse proteins in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) may be useful biomarkers to monitor synaptic degeneration. Neurogranin in cerebrospinal fluid correlates with cognitive decline and is a potential novel biomarker for Alzheimer disease (AD) dementia. This report compares three different studies that tested the ability of neurogranin to act as a biomarker for Alzheimer related decline in cognitive function and predicting the advancement of the disease by detecting synaptic loss. The first study was conducted within the memory clinic-based Amsterdam Dementia Cohort where it compared cerebrospinal fluid neurogranin of patients with Alzheimer’s to that of controls with normal cognitive function it showed that baseline CSF levels of neurogranin in patients with AD were higher than in cognitively normal participants. The second study tested the performance of cerebrospinal fluid neurogranin to predict cognitive decline and brain injury in the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative study. An in-house immunoassay was used to analyze neurogranin in cerebrospinal fluid samples from a cohort of patients who were diagnosed as having Alzheimer’s disease with dementia or mild cognitive impairment, as well as in cognitively normal subjects, the results demonstrated that cerebrospinal fluid neurogranin is increased already at the early clinical stage of Alzheimer’s disease and predicts cognitive deterioration and diseaseassociated changes over time. The third and final study was A cross-sectional and longitudinal observational study of cognitive decline in patients with symptomatic AD and cognitively normal controls, concluded that CSF levels of the synaptic marker neurogranin offer diagnostic and prognostic utility for early symptomatic AD that is comparable to other CSF markers. Also, CSF neurogranin complements the collective ability of these markers to predict future cognitive decline in cognitively normal individuals and, therefore, will be a useful addition to the current panel of AD biomarkers
