Researchers at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and other institutions recently explored the possibility that differences in this sequence’s repetition are associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Their study, published in Nature Neuroscience, linked longer repeats to higher odds of having the disease in Chinese participants, with a smaller association in people of European ancestry.
Laboratory experiments also suggested that longer repeats increase FAM193B activity, hinting at a possible link between this inherited DNA variation and processes involved in cellular damage.