There are many diseases that can affect the brain. Symptoms of these diseases include loss of memory, problem solving, and reasoning. They can also affect your mood. They include illnesses such as dementia, Alzheimer disease (AD), depression, and anxiety. The reasons for these illnesses are complex, meaning they are caused by multiple genes or environmental factors. These illnesses affect between 5.4 to 16.2 million people in the US alone, and their prevalence is rising around the globe. Given the public health burden of these diseases, we aim to identify new risk factors that could be used to find new a) at-risk groups, b) new causes of these diseases, and c) new therapies.
Our approach to identify new genetic risk factors is to combine genetic data, from the UK Biobank and other sources, with gene expression and epigenetic data from human brains. This approach allows us to identify both genetic risk factors and potentially disease-causing genes. We will also explore how health determinates interact with those risk factors to influence individual risk for AD, dementia, and mental health illnesses.