Besides innate immunity pathways, network analysis of transcriptomic data from the brain hippocampus of normal aged and AD subjects identified key transcriptional regulators related to insulin (INS1, INS2) and brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) interacting with the retinoic acid receptor related orphan receptor (RORA, Acquaah-Mensah et al., 2015) previously implicated in autoimmunity and diabetes (Solt and Burris, 2012). Here, INS is linked to Alzheimer disease.