Abstract
Vascular cognitive impairment and dementia (VCID) is the second most common form of dementia behind Alzheimer's disease (AD). It is estimated that 40% of AD patients also have some form of VCID. One promising therapeutic for AD is anti-Aβ immunotherapy, which uses antibodies against Aβ to clear it from the brain. While successful in clearing Aβ and improving cognition in mice, anti-Aβ immunotherapy failed to reach primary cognitive outcomes in several different clinical trials. We hypothesized that one potential reason the anti-Aβ immunotherapy clinical trials were unsuccessful was due to this high percentage of VCID comorbidity in the AD population. We used our unique model of VCID-amyloid comorbidity to test this hypothesis. We placed 9-month-old wild-type and APP/PS1 mice on either a control diet or a diet that induces hyperhomocysteinemia (HHcy). After being placed on the diet for 3 months, the mice then received intraperotineal injections of either IgG2a control or 3D6 for another 3 months. While we found that treatment of our comorbidity model with 3D6 resulted in decreased total Aβ levels, there was no cognitive benefit of the anti-Aβ immunotherapy in our AD/VCID mice. Further, microhemorrhages were increased by 3D6 in the APP/PS1/control but further increased in an additive fashion when 3D6 was administered to the APP/PS1/HHcy mice. This suggests that the use of anti-Aβ immunotherapy in patients with both AD and VCID would be ineffective on cognitive outcomes.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-21-2016
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1762-16.2016
Funding Information
This work was supported by Fellowship F31NS092202 to E.M.W. and National Institutes of Health Grant 1RO1NS079637 to D.M.W. These studies were assisted by the Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Spectroscopy Center at the University of Kentucky (National Institutes of Health shared instruments Grant 1S10RR029541).
Repository Citation
Weekman, Erica M.; Sudduth, Tiffany L.; Caverly, Carly N.; Kopper, Timothy J.; Phillips, Oliver W.; Powell, David K.; and Wilcock, Donna M., "Reduced Efficacy of Anti-Aβ Immunotherapy in a Mouse Model of Amyloid Deposition and Vascular Cognitive Impairment Comorbidity" (2016). Sanders-Brown Center on Aging Faculty Publications. 77.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/sbcoa_facpub/77
Included in
Diseases Commons, Family, Life Course, and Society Commons, Geriatrics Commons, Neuroscience and Neurobiology Commons
Notes/Citation Information
Published in The Journal of Neuroscience, v. 36, issue 38, p. 9896-9907.
Copyright © 2016 the authors
This work is available to the public to copy, distribute, or display under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).