Worked with Jordan Green, Mia Nakamura, Elliot Shi.
Dementia due to Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a common condition which often is reflected in brain volume. Using MRI data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), this study investigates the genetic association between brain volume and brain section's volume in relation to Dementia caused by Alzheimer's Disease. ADNI data, following quality control, included the genetic data of 812 subjects and 1,239,603 autosomal SNPs. A Genome Wide Association Study (GWAS) was used to investigate the linear association between the presence of individual single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and the MRI imaging measures of whole brain volume, Hippocampus volume, and Entorhinal volume. Our findings are the following: two SNPs, rs769449 and rs4420638, met the significance threshold of 5e-8 for entorhinal volume and hippocampus volume respectively. In addition to the common covariates: age, sex, principal components 1-4, and total brain volume (TBV for our entorhinal and hippocampus GWAS), we performed a second GWAS for each phenotype with included APOE4 frequency as a covariate. This overall reduced the p-value of each SNP. Some notable SNPs met suggestive thresholds of 1e-5 in both GWAS including: kgp11369900, kgp2089601, rs12958162, and rs7797507.