The amount of liver polyploidy in a group of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) was compared with that of an age-matched control group. There was great variability in the percentage of cells in each ploidy class from one individual to the next in both control and AD subjects. AD patients had a lower percentage of 2N cells, and a higher percentage of 4N cells than the controls. There was no difference in the percentage of 8N or 16N cells in AD, indicating that there was no shift to higher ploidy classes in AD. The most stringent statistical analysis failed to reveal statistically significant differences between the AD and control groups.
