APP and early-onset autosomal dominant Alzheimer disease: Recently, DAPK1 was found to contribute to cortical spine and synapse degeneration after ischemia in vivo, and genetic deletion of the DAPK1 catalytic domain reversed hippocampal spine and synapse loss in Tg2576-APP Alzheimer disease mice (Pei et al., 2015; Shu et al., 2016).