Singular cases of Alzheimer’s disease disclose new and old genetic “acquaintances”

BACKGROUND: Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common age-related dementia. Besides its typical presentation with amnestic syndrome at onset, atypical AD cases are being increasingly recognized, often in presenile age. OBJECTIVES: To provide an extensive clinical and genetic characterization of six AD patients carrying one or more singular features, including age of onset, atypical phenotype and disease progression rate. By reviewing the pertinent literature and accessing publicly available databases, we aimed to assess the frequency and the significance of the identified genetic variants. METHODS: Biomarkers of amyloid-β deposition and neurodegeneration were used to establish the in vivo diagnosis of probable AD, in addition to neurological and neuropsychological evaluation, extensive laboratory assays and neuroradiological data. Considering the presenile onset of the majority of the cases, we hypothesized genetically determined AD and performed extensive genetic analyses by both Sanger sequencing and next generation sequencing (NGS). RESULTS: We disclosed two known missense variants, one in PSEN1 and the other in PSEN2, and a novel silent variant in PSEN2. Most notably, we identified several additional variants in other dementia-related genes by NGS. Some of them have never been reported in any control or disease databases, representing variants unique to our cases. CONCLUSIONS: This work underlines the difficulties in reaching a confident in vivo diagnosis in cases of atypical dementia. Moreover, a wider genetic analysis by NGS approach may prove to be useful in specific cases, especially when the study of the so-far known AD causative genes produces negative or conflicting results.