Association of the Alzheimer's Disease Clusterin Risk Allele with Plasma Clusterin Concentration

A variant within the clusterin gene has been recently associated with increased risk for Alzheimer's disease (AD) in genome wide association studies. Here we tested the association of the respective single nucleotide polymorphisms (rs11136000) with plasma concentration of clusterin in 67 AD subjects and 191 cognitively unimpaired elderly individuals. We observed an association of the rs11136000 AD-risk variant with low clusterin plasma levels in an allele-dose dependent manner in the healthy individuals (p = 0.011). This effect was numerically also present in the AD patients. We conclude that the rs11136000 AD-risk variant is associated with low clusterin plasma levels.