Variants in the MS4A cluster interact with soluble TREM2 expression on biomarkers of neuropathology

Recent evidence suggests that Alzheimer’s disease (AD) genetic risk variants (rs1582763 and rs6591561) of the MS4A locus are genome-wide significant regulators of soluble TREM2 levels such that the minor allele of the protective variant (rs1582763) is associated with higher sTREM2 and lower AD risk while the minor allele of (rs6591561) relates to lower sTREM2 and higher AD risk. Our group previously found that higher sTREM2 relates to higher Aβ40, worse blood–brain barrier (BBB) integrity (measured with the CSF/plasma albumin ratio), and higher CSF tau, suggesting strong associations with amyloid abundance and both BBB and neurodegeneration complicate interpretation. We expand on this work by leveraging these common variants as genetic tools to tune the interpretation of high CSF sTREM2, and by exploring the potential modifying role of these variants on the well-established associations between CSF sTREM2 as well as TREM2 transcript levels in the brain with AD neuropathology. Biomarker analyses leveraged data from the Vanderbilt Memory & Aging Project (n = 127, age = 72 ± 6.43) and were replicated in the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (n = 399, age = 73 ± 7.39). Autopsy analyses were performed leveraging data from the Religious Orders Study and Rush Memory and Aging Project (n = 577, age = 89 ± 6.46). We found that the protective variant rs1582763 attenuated the association between CSF sTREM2 and Aβ40 (β = -0.44, p-value = 0.017) and replicated this interaction in ADNI (β = -0.27, p = 0.017). We did not observe this same interaction effect between TREM2 mRNA levels and Aβ peptides in brain (Aβ total β = -0.14, p = 0.629; Aβ1-38, β = 0.11, p = 0.200). In contrast to the effects on Aβ, the minor allele of this same variant seemed to enhance the association with blood–brain barrier dysfunction (β = 7.0e-4, p = 0.009), suggesting that elevated sTREM2 may carry a much different interpretation in carriers vs. non-carriers of this allele. When evaluating the risk variant (rs6591561) across datasets, we did not observe a statistically significant interaction against any outcome in VMAP and observed opposing directions of associations in ADNI and ROS/MAP on Aβ levels. Together, our results suggest that the protective effect of rs1582763 may act by decoupling the associations between sTREM2 and amyloid abundance, providing important mechanistic insight into sTREM2 changes and highlighting the need to incorporate genetic context into the analysis of sTREM2 levels, particularly if leveraged as a clinical biomarker of disease in the future.