Identifying the Correlation between Alzheimer and type 2 Diabetes

Abstract

In recent years it has been assessed that in people with type 2 diabetes the likelihood of developing Alzheimer's disease increases by more than 50%. The purpose of the analysis proposed in this paper is to identify visually the correlation between Alzheimer's disease and type 2 diabetes and determine whether Alzheimer's disease is a form of brain diabetes mellitus. A dataset containing genomic microarray data relating to the two diseases is used for the analysis. First, we conduct an exploratory analysis using clustering techniques to perform a first screening of the samples and divide them into two different clusters. Then, we propose a predictive model for the classification and identify the genes equally expressed in the two types of samples. This makes it possible to select genes with significant values for the research in progress, on which pathway analysis must be performed to identify the classes they belong to. We also study the gene expression alterations of genes belonging to a specific pathway to determine if the differential expression is statistically significant. We provide a visual representation of connections in the pathways of both the diseases. Results indicate that there is a set of genes of significant importance for both type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer's disease, but that there is also a significant correlation with other neurodegenerative diseases. Consequently, it is possible to define the Alzheimer's disease as a form of cerebral diabetes mellitus.