HONOLULU: Tomm40 REPORTED TO TRACK WITH BRAIN ATROPHY, COGNITION

Tomm40 has created a stir in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) research with the recent proposal that variable-length polymorphisms of this gene, which lives near apolipoprotein E (ApoE) on chromosome 19, can help predict at what age a person may develop late-onset AD (LOAD) [1,2]. This finding came from analysis of several small cohorts in which ages of LOAD on-set were determined retrospectively. Now, new work on Tomm40 (aka translocase of the outer mitochon-drial membrane 40) confirms the age-of-onset connec-tion in a small prospective study of cognitively normal adults who went on to develop mild cognitive impair-ment (MCI) or AD. Scientists reported the preliminary findings at the International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease (ICAD) held 10-15 July in Honolulu, Hawaii, along with other data showing that the Tomm40 length variants also correlate with brain atrophy and cogni-tion in asymptomatic middle-aged people. If the re-sults hold up, they could explain why some ApoE3/E3 homozygotes, a supposedly risk-neutral group, have LOAD risk that parallels that of E4 carriers, and may improve stratification of participants in future clinical trials. Plowing through phylogenetic analyses, researcher