Common Aging Signature in the Peripheral Blood of Vascular Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and vascular dementia (VaD) are the two most dominant forms of dementia in elderly people. Due to the large overlap between AD and VaD in clinical observations, great controversies exist regarding the distinction and connection between these two types of senile dementia. Here for the first time, we resort to the gene expression pattern of the peripheral blood to compare AD and VaD objectively. In our previous work, we have demonstrated that the dysregulation of gene expression in AD is unique among the examined diseases including neurological diseases, cancer, and metabolic diseases. In this study, we found that the dysregulation of gene expression in AD and VaD is quite similar to each other at both functional and gene levels. Interestingly, the dysregulation started at the early stages of the diseases, namely mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and vascular cognitive impairment (VCI). We have also shown that this signature is distinctive from that of peripheral vascular diseases. Comparison with aging studies revealed that the most profound change in AD and VaD, namely ribosome, is consistent with the accelerated aging scenario. This study may have implications to the common mechanism between AD and VaD.