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REVIEW article

Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Aging Psychiatry
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1480438
This article is part of the Research Topic The Role of Neuropsychiatry in Neurodegenerative Disorders View all 3 articles

The role of interferon signaling in neurodegeneration and neuropsychiatric disorders

Provisionally accepted

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Recent advances in transcriptomics research have uncovered heightened interferon (IFN) responses in neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer's disease, primary tauopathy, Parkinson's disease, TDP-43 proteinopathy, and related mouse models. Augmented IFN signaling is now relatively well established for microglia in these contexts, but emerging work has highlighted a novel role for IFN-responsive T cells in the brain and peripheral blood in some types of neurodegeneration. These findings complement a body of literature implicating dysregulated IFN signaling in neuropsychiatric disorders including major depression and posttraumatic stress disorder. In this review, we will characterize and integrate advances in our understanding of IFN responses in neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disease, discuss how sex and ancestry modulate the IFN response, and examine potential mechanistic explanations for the upregulation of antiviral-like IFN signaling pathways in these seemingly non-viral neurological and psychiatric disorders.

    Keywords: interferon, neurodegeneration, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, TDP-43, C9orf72, neuropsychiatric disease, autoimmune disease

    Received: 14 Aug 2024; Accepted: 09 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Sirkis, Oddi, Jonson, Bonham, Hoang and Yokoyama. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence:
    Daniel W. Sirkis, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, United States
    Jennifer S. Yokoyama, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.