GFAP and Alzheimer disease: Altered astrocyte physiology has also been linked to aging and to the most common age-related neurodegenerative disorder, Alzheimer’s disease (AD), by transcriptome profiling of gene expression changes in astrocytes from aged mouse cortex (Orre et al., 2014) and in glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP)-positive cells isolated by laser-capture microdissection from postmortem tissues of subjects with AD (Simpson et al., 2011; Sekar et al., 2015).