Alzheimer’s Disease Biomarkers: More Than Molecular Diagnostics

Abstract

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a complex, progressive, and eventually fatal neurodegenerative disease that currently lacks effective treatment options. The disease process is only partially understood. Biomarker identification and analysis will be important for facilitating a deeper understanding of the molecular nature of the disease process and neuropathology, diagnosis of the disease at its earliest stages, in assessing disease progression and to enable the drug discovery and development process. This review assesses progress in a number of areas of AD biomarker discovery and development, constituting a potential systems approach to understanding and diagnosing this disease, including next-generation DNA sequencing of human genomes, genome-wide association studies, epigenetics (including DNA methylation and micro-RNA profiling), gene expression profiling, lipidomics and metabolomics, proteomics, and neuroimaging.