Blood Cathepsins on the Risk of Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Pathological Biomarkers: Results from Observational Cohort and Mendelian Randomization Study

Background Alzheimer’s disease (AD), the main type of dementia, involves in complex pathophysiological processes, including abnormal lysosomes function. Cathepsins are the predominant proteases responsible for the degradation of diverse substrates in the endo-lysosomal system. However, there was still a lack of systematic study on the causal association between cathepsins and AD. Methods This study utilized Mendelian randomization (MR) to investigate the association between blood cathepsins and the risk of AD, as well as the level of amyloid-β (Aβ) and p-Tau in cerebrospinal fluid. Furthermore, an independent dataset was employed to corroborate the above result. Importantly, this study incorporated the Alzheimer’s disease Immunization and Microbiota Initiative study Cohort to further validate the alteration of blood cathepsins expression level and examine its correlation with cognitive level and plasma AD-related pathological markers. Results Using MR method, we observed that high level of cathepsin L (CTSL) was associated with a lower risk of AD in both training and validation data. In observational cohort, we found there was decreased blood CTSL expression level in Aβ+ cognitive impaired (CI) group, compared with Aβ− cognitive unimpaired (CU) group. Correlation analysis revealed that blood CTSL expression level was negatively correlated with Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) and Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) score, plasma Aβ42 and Aβ42/40 level in Aβ+ CI group. Mediation analysis showed that plasma Aβ42/40 level was the key mediator in the association between blood CTSL and MMSE score in Aβ+ CI participants. Conclusion This study revealed that blood CTSL was an important factor affecting the risk of AD, and it affected the cognitive level of AD patients through plasma Aβ42/40 level.