Area under the curve (AUC % normalized to last control for each experiment) of human astrocytes ingesting control or AD synaptoneurosomes shows statistically significant decrease in phagocytosis of treated with anti-MFG-E8 antibody, but not IgG1, compared with AD untreated synaptoneurosomes and a significant difference between IgG1-treated and MFG-E8-treated synapse phagocytosis (n = 5 independent culture replicates; ANOVA after linear mixed effects model with disease status of synapse donor, time, and treatment as fixed effects and experimental replicate as a random effect shows an effect of disease of synapse donor F[1,30.2] = 9.674, p = 0.004058; treatment F[3,32.1] = 237.4, p = 2.2 × 10−6, and an interaction between disease status of synapse donor and treatment F[2,30.2] = 4.63, p = 0.0176). Post hoc Tukey corrected tests show in the AD synapse-treated cells that anti-MFG-E8 pre-treatment reduces phagocytosis compared with both no treatment (p = 0.0011) and IgG1 treatment (p = 0.0384).
