Increased occurrence of Treponema spp. and double-species infections in patients with Alzheimer's disease

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Authors	NEMERGUT Michal BÁŤKOVÁ Tereza VIGAŠOVÁ Dana BARTOŠ Milan HLOZANKOVA Martina SMITH Andrea LIŠKOVÁ Barbora SHEARDOVÁ Kateřina VYHNALEK Martin HORT Jakub LACZO Jan KOVÁČOVÁ Ingrid ŠITINA Michal MATEJ Radoslav JANČÁLEK Radim MAREK Martin DAMBORSKÝ Jiří
Year of publication	2022
Type	Article in Periodical
Magazine / Source	Science of the Total Environment
MU Faculty or unit	Faculty of Science
Citation
Web	https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969722042115?via%3Dihub
Doi	http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.157114
Keywords	Alzheimer'sdisease; Treponemaspp; Microbialinfection; Pathogen; Serum; PCR
Description	Although the link between microbial infections and Alzheimer's disease (AD) has been demonstrated in multiple studies, the involvement of pathogens in the development of AD remains unclear. Here, we investigated the fre-quency of the 10 most commonly cited viral (HSV-1, EBV, HHV-6, HHV-7, and CMV) and bacterial (Chlamydia pneumoniae, Helicobacter pylori, Borrelia burgdorferi, Porphyromonas gingivalis, and Treponema spp.) pathogens in serum, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and brain tissues of AD patients. We have used an in-house multiplex PCR kit for simultaneous detection of five bacterial and five viral pathogens in serum and CSF samples from 50 AD patients and 53 healthy controls (CTRL). We observed a significantly higher frequency rate of AD patients who tested positive for Treponema spp. compared to controls (AD: 62.2 %; CTRL: 30.3 %; p-value = 0.007). Fur-thermore, we confirmed a significantly higher occurrence of cases with two or more simultaneous infections in AD patients compared to controls (AD: 24 %; CTRL 7.5 %; p-value = 0.029). The studied pathogens were de-tected with comparable frequency in serum and CSF. In contrast, Borrelia burgdorferi, human herpesvirus 7, and human cytomegalovirus were not detected in any of the studied samples. This study provides further evidence of the association between microbial infections and AD and shows that paralleled analysis of multiple sample specimens provides complementary information and is advisable for future studies.
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