Comparison between Serum BDNF levels in an Egyptian sample of Alzheimer's Disease Patients and Healthy Controls

Background: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized by cognitive decline and loss of neurons in specific brain regions. There is bulk of data establishing the relation between BDNF and dementia. Objective: to replicate and verify this relation among an Egyptian sample which might be a preliminary step towards further research on its evaluation as a candidate marker for early clinical diagnosis and therapeutic monitoring in Alzheimer's disease. Subjects and methods: Twenty AD patients and 18 age and gender matched healthy controls whose Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) was above 25 were recruited over the period of 1 year. Our results found a statistically significant negative correlation between age of cases and serum levels of BDNF but failed to find a statistically significant difference between cases and controls regarding level of serum BDNF. Also, the study failed to find a statistically significant relation between serum BDNF and clinical severity of dementia severity. Conclusion: In Egyptian population age is negatively correlated to serum BDNF. But further study of relation to dementia should be carried using more sophisticated tools for the assessment of neurocognitive functions as MMSE and clinical dementia ratings are probably too crude to be correlated to changes in serum BDNF.