Early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s may pave the way for new treatments that slow the disease, and shortly after finishing her Ph.D., Allison Aiello was intrigued to find an early clue that might help predict future cognitive decline. By analyzing data from a population study of older Latinos from the Sacramento area, she uncovered a tenuous link between cognitive decline and infection with cytomegalovirus (CMV), a type of herpes virus that causes chronic, life-long infections.1
Certain infectious diseases could eventually lead to neurodegeneration, early evidence suggests.Credit: kirstypargeter/iStock/Getty Images
But funding was scarce, so for the next 15 years, Aiello, now a professor of epidemiology at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, kept up with the research and conducted studies when she could. Then, in 2018, she received a $50,000 seed grant from the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) Foundation’s Microbial Pathogenesis in Alzheimer’s Disease Grant, part of a funding program for investigating possible links between microbes and Alzheimer’s disease, an area that has not been well funded.
“Most of what we grant is seed money to help investigators get a toe-hold in a competitive sphere,” said Thomas Fekete, chair of medicine at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University Hospital, and chair of IDSA Foundation.
Aiello leveraged her toe-hold to give the field a lift. By analyzing data on 5,617 people over 65, she found that people with high CMV antibody levels had cognition four to five years below age norms. Aiello, who studies social determinants of chronic diseases, also discovered that those who did not finish high school were at greater risk for low cognition than more educated people.2
The study, reported in October in the American Journal of Epidemiology, was “the first to examine the potential buffering impact of educational attainment on the association between CMV and these outcomes in older age,” Aiello said.
Longitudinal studies could help uncover links between microbial pathogens and chronic disease, including Parkinson’s disease, stroke, colorectal cancer, and neurological diseases, but few have been conducted, says Cynthia Sears, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who chairs the Microbial Pathogenesis in Alzheimer’s Disease Grant review panel. “It’s been difficult to nail down the initial events and disease signatures that build up over time,” Sears says.
To unravel the complex origins of Alzheimer’s Disease, the IDSA Foundation has funded grants to investigators who might otherwise have trouble lining up for innovative proposals. So far, the program, which launched in 2018, has funded proposals ranging from epidemiology and animal studies to data analytics and microbiology. IDSA Foundation dispensed 10 separate $100,000 grants in 2020, and hopes to increase funding for 2021.
The program has also funded small pilot grants in underserved areas. Last year Mujeeb Salaam, an investigator at the Islamic University in Uganda, used an $8,000 grant from IDSA Foundation to begin investigating whether HIV/AIDS and syphilis predispose people in Uganda to dementia.
To help improve early detection of Alzheimer’s, Aiello is planning additional cohort studies that could reveal initial signs of cognitive decline. “More and more evidence shows that these processes start early,” she said. “We want to do more in-depth cognitive impairment studies and collect markers of CMV, infections and Alzheimer’s disease starting when people are younger.”
Meanwhile, early results from the IDSA Foundation grants have helped generate more interest in the link between pathogens and Alzheimer’s Disease. In fact, the National Institutes of Health recently launched its first program to fund research in the field.