MST1 and Cognitive impairment: Indeed, in vivo studies involving AAV-mediated MST1 overexpression in the hippocampus of WT mice, indicate that MST1 overexpression alone is sufficient to produce deleterious neurodegenerative phenotypes, including cognitive impairments, synaptic dysfunction, disruption of hippocampal neural networks, neuronal apoptosis, neuronal loss, and synaptic loss [19, 112, 232].