How does Alzheimer's disease and epigenetics relate?

Answer 1

Alzheimer's disease is a type of dementia that affects long term memory functions of individuals who have this. There are some pre-clinical and clinical studies that link the role of epigenetics and disease. Epigenetics is a branch in genetics that deal with modifications of genetic expressions in an individual rather than changes to the genetic code. A common example of epigenetic regulation is methylation; when DNA is methylated, the expression is repressed and thus no proteins can be made from that gene that is inactivated. The opposite is true for acetylation which helps allow for DNA to be more expressed as it takes a euchromatin form. Knowing this background, the idea of epigenetics in disease transmission is that there may be certain mRNA or protein created in the advancement of Alzheimer's that modify the gene expression in such a way that it favors certain mRNA transcription more and some less. This will then affect protein level locally that may be related to the pathology of Alzheimers. The importance of this is that there is a molecular "switch" that can activate or repress genetic expression that leads to the underlying pathology of the disease.