Dear Colleagues,

Progressive neurodegenerative disease such as Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia, motor neuron disease and Parkinson’s disease have both shared and distinct features, associated with various patterns of neurodegeneration. However, most patients also exhibit marked overlaps with neuropsychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia, depression and autism, making it difficult for accurate differential diagnosis and prognosis. Mutations in the C9orf72 gene are the most common cause of frontotemporal dementia and motor neuron disease, and are associated with a psychosis phenotype, and independently with schizophrenia in certain families. It is acknowledged that the identification of accurate clinical phenotypes is required for treatment purposes. There has been great progress in the development of neuroimaging, neuropsychiatric tools and peripheral biomarkers that has enable accurate diagnosis within the clinical and real-time monitoring of therapeutic interventions. For example, the development of the fixel-based approach for the analyses of white matter tracks may generate new patient-based neuroimaging measures of white matter degeneration or abnormal neurodevelopment with greater diagnostic sensitivity than current methodologies. Further, analyes of exosomes and their cargoes of nucleic acids and proteins have been used for diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia and bipolar disorders. This Special Issue will be dedicated to highlighting the exciting next generation of biomarkers that can inform on the overlap between neurodegenerative diseases and neuropsychatric conditions. The focus will be the on biomarkers that integrate multimodal data from neuroimaging; behavioural/neuropsychiatric tests; and genetic, epigenetic, proteomics, lipidomics and transcriptomics studies, driven by improvements in our understanding of disease biology and advances in technology and bioinformatics.

Dr. John B. Kwok
Guest Editor

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• Neuroimaging
• Transcriptomics
• Proteomics
• Metabolomics
• Lipidomics
• Epigenetic
• Peripheral biomarkers
• Diagnosis and prognosis
• Bioinformatics
• Neurodegeneration
• Neuropsychiatric disorders