Dipartimento Interateneo di Fisica M. Merlin, Universitá degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro, 70125, Bari, Italy.
Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), Sezione di Bari, 70125, Bari, Italy.
Sci Rep. 2024 Mar 5;14(1):5385. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-55439-1.
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common type of dementia with millions of affected patients worldwide. Currently, there is still no cure and AD is often diagnosed long time after onset because there is no clear diagnosis. Thus, it is essential to study the physiology and pathogenesis of AD, investigating the risk factors that could be strongly connected to the disease onset. Despite AD, like other complex diseases, is the result of the combination of several factors, there is emerging agreement that environmental pollution should play a pivotal role in the causes of disease. In this work, we implemented an Artificial Intelligence model to predict AD mortality, expressed as Standardized Mortality Ratio, at Italian provincial level over 5 years. We employed a set of publicly available variables concerning pollution, health, society and economy to feed a Random Forest algorithm. Using methods based on eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) we found that air pollution (mainly and ) contribute the most to AD mortality prediction. These results could help to shed light on the etiology of Alzheimer's disease and to confirm the urgent need to further investigate the relationship between the environment and the disease.
阿尔茨海默病(AD)是最常见的痴呆症类型,全球有数百万患者。目前,仍然没有治愈方法,AD 通常在发病后很长时间才被诊断出来,因为没有明确的诊断。因此,研究 AD 的生理学和发病机制至关重要,研究可能与疾病发病密切相关的风险因素。尽管 AD 与其他复杂疾病一样,是多种因素共同作用的结果,但人们越来越认为环境污染应该在疾病的病因中起关键作用。在这项工作中,我们在意大利省级层面上实施了一种人工智能模型,以预测 AD 的死亡率,死亡率表示为标准化死亡率。我们使用了一组关于污染、健康、社会和经济的公开变量来为随机森林算法提供信息。使用基于可解释人工智能(XAI)的方法,我们发现空气污染(主要是 和 )对 AD 死亡率的预测贡献最大。这些结果有助于揭示阿尔茨海默病的病因,并证实迫切需要进一步研究环境与疾病之间的关系。