Finally, we performed similar analyses with TREM2 carriers. TREM2 is involved in the immune response and its role in amyloid-β deposition or clearance remains controversial [67]. Our analysis on the Knight-ADRC data showed significantly higher relative astrocytic proportion in AD affected TREM2 carriers (n = 20) compared to controls (β = 0.11; p = 1.05 × 10−02; Table 4; Fig. 3d). Despite TREM2 carriers presenting lower neuron relative proportion compared to controls, this difference was not statistically significant (p > 0.05; Table 4; Fig. 3d). We analyzed whether the TREM2 carriers provided sufficient power to detect a significant association. Our empirical estimates showed that TREM2 sample size provides 96% of power to detect an association with an effect size comparable to that observed for sporadic AD (β = − 0.11). We also investigated the cellular proportion of the 11 TREM2 carriers in the MSBB dataset. The multi-region analysis showed TREM2 carriers do not show a significant difference in relative neuronal proportion compared to controls (p > 0.05; Table 4; Fig. 4e), whereas in the AD TREM2 non-carriers the relative neuronal
