Contrary to the hypothesis that alleles associated with increased RA risk are also associated with reduced AD risk, only three of the seventeen RA-associated SNPs in our Stage 1 study were nominally significant for association with AD (p < 0.05, Table 1 ).
This population showed a trend in the OR of rs2837960 that was consistent with that of the Stage 1 analysis (Table 5 ), i.e., the minor rs2837960_G allele appeared to impart an increased, although non-significant, risk of AD.
Thus, our secondary finding is that the minor allele of rs2837960 showed a strong trend for association with increased expression of BACE2tot and BACE2d7 , the latter of which may represent the majority of functional BACE2 in human brain [ 14 ].