We specifically focused on 33 independent (except for the APOE ε4 and APOE ε2 variants encoded by the minor alleles of rs429358 and rs7412, respectively) AD-associated common SNPs (defined as a minor allele frequency (MAF) > 5%) in the European population reported or replicated in large-scale GWAS and meta-analyses [2–9] (Fig. 1a). This evidence concerns the gene APOE and Alzheimer disease.