Exposing the Brain Proteomic Signatures of Alzheimer’s Disease in Diverse Racial Groups!

 

I'm not going to embarrass myself by pretending that I can follow the maths used in this impressive new meta-analysis, but the results are....sobering...and absolutely critical to keep in mind! 

What did they do? They used powerful machine learning approaches to look at several cohorts of Alzheimer's proteomes that were all analyzed with TMT based multiplexed proteomics. There were a couple of goals here. The first was to see if they could identify important biomarkers in the disease. The second was to see how much the genetic backgrounds of the patients change things. 

Good news? They found some interesting markers. 

Bad news? 

We've really really got to think about the patient samples that we use as if they come from genetically distinct individuals who may have seemingly unrelated traits that may affect our results and whether our results will be the same in other people or populations. We know this. We're all trying to get our numbers of technical replicates and biological n up. While this study reinforces how important this is, it is still optimistic that advanced tools can still find potential markers! 

We aren't the only ones who need to think more along these lines and really step it up if we're going to move medicine forward.