Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a complex and multifactorial progressive neurodegenerative disease. Recently, two studies reported inconsistent results on a possible involvement of the NEDD9 (neural precursor cell expressed, developmentally down-regulated 9, 6p25-p24) as a candidate gene for the risk of developing AD and/or Parkinson's disease (PD). We analyzed the distribution of the rs760678 SNP polymorphism in 735 Italian subjects: 214 unrelated sporadic late-onset AD patients (LOAD, 64.5% females, mean age-at-onset 71.8+/-5.2 years), 135 early-onset AD patients (EOAD, 57.3% females, mean age-at-onset 57.5+/-5.5 years) and 386 healthy controls (68.9% females, mean age 83.4+/-17.9 years; SD). We observed a statistically significant difference between LOAD patients and controls according to genotypes (P=0.016) and allele frequency (P=0.007); CC genotype was more frequent in LOAD cases (44.4%) than controls (36.0%). No difference after stratification of the data in terms of gender and status of the APOE epsilon4 allele was observed. In conclusion, our data do support an implication of the NEDD9 allelic variant in late-onset AD, with an independent effect of the apolipoprotein E (APOE) epsilon4 allele in the risk of developing AD.
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