TY - JOUR T1 - Platelet phosphorylated TDP-43: An exploratory study for a peripheral surrogate biomarker development for Alzheimer’s disease JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/132837 SP - 132837 AU - Rodger Wilhite AU - Jessica Sage AU - Abdurrahman Bouzid AU - Tyler Primavera AU - Abdulbaki Agbas Y1 - 2017/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/23/132837.abstract N2 - Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States. The World Health Organization predicted that the world population with AD will rise to about 75 million by 2030. Therefore, AD and other forms of dementia create a non-curable disease population, and a socioeconomic burden in the world’s societies. It is imperative to diagnose AD and other neurodegenerative diseases at their early stage. Consequently, it is important to develop a blood-based biomarker so that the remedial or disease-altering therapeutical interventions for AD patients would be available at the early stages of the disease. We have identified an easy, feasible, cost-effective, and less invasive assay method that measures a cellular protein that may be a potential biomarker candidate for the neurodegenerative diseases; platelet phosphorylated Transactive Response DNA Binding Protein 43 (pTDP-43). This protein recently gained an attention that can be served for monitoring the development of at least two neurodegenerative diseases (i.e., AD and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS). We have identified an assay platform and generated some preliminary data may suggest that the platelet TDP-43 that were increased (<65%) in post-mortem AD brain regions and similar trends were also observed in AD patient’s platelet. In this study, we propose that platelet phosphorylated form of TDP-43 could be used as a potential surrogate biomarker that is easy to measure, reproducible, sensitive, and cost effective for screening the patients with some early clinical signs of AD and can be used to monitor disease prognosis. ER -