Ageing and alzheimer's disease

Newman, Tracey Anne (1998) Ageing and alzheimer's disease. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.

Abstract

The aim of this thesis its to investigate the association between the two principal neuropathological features of Alzheimer's disease, senile plaques and neurofibrillary tangles and graded aged-related changes found in other organs at post-mortem.

The investigation will test the hypothesis that there is a correlation between the neuropathology of Alzheimer's disease and ageing change in other organs.

Results: 134 males (age range 24-92, median 73yrs) and 89 females (age range 21-98, median 79yrs) were studied. The main cause of death, circulatory system disease, reflected the leading cause of death for the study area at the time. A total of 9953 out of a possible 11061 values were used in the final analysis. In the sample 18 systemic and 15 neuropathological and 12 systemic and 9 neuropathological features in the male and female cases respectively were found to correlate with age (p ≤ 0.001 - 0.05). Examination of the correlations in the systemic data showed that 28 of 484 and 51 of 441 possible correlations in the male and female cases were significant. Within the neuropathological features examined there were 274 of a possible 400 correlations of which 189 were p ≤ 0.001 in the male cases and 205 out of 400 with 131 showing a significance of p ≤ 0.001 in the female cases. In the male and female cases 20% and 12% of the correlations between the neuropathological and systemic data were found to be significant.

Conclusions: The sample exhibited a spectrum of ageing associated change in the systems investigated. The pattern of these changes differs between the male and female case in this population. A number of significant correlations have been found between the incidence of senile plaques and neurofibrillary tangles and certain systemic features. These associations were different for the male and female populations. These results provide some support to the original hypothesis and could be the basis for a deeper more focused investigation.

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