Diagnostic value of plasma phosphorylated tau181 in Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal lobar degeneration

By Elisabeth H. Thijssen, R. La Joie, Amy Wolf, Amelia Strom, Ping Wang, Leonardo Iaccarino, Viktoriya Bourakova, Y. Cobigo, Hilary W. Heuer, S. Spina and 44 more. Nature Medicine, 2020

613 citations recorded by the source corpus.

With the potential development of new disease-modifying Alzheimer’s disease (AD) therapies, simple, widely available screening tests are needed to identify which individuals, who are experiencing symptoms of cognitive or behavioral decline, should be further evaluated for initiation of treatment. A blood-based test for AD would be a less invasive and less expensive screening tool than the currently approved cerebrospinal fluid or amyloid β positron emission tomography (PET) diagnostic tests. We examined whether plasma tau phosphorylated at residue 181 (pTau181) could differentiate between clinically diagnosed or autopsy-confirmed AD and frontotemporal lobar degeneration. Plasma pTau181 concentrations were increased by 3.5-fold in AD compared to controls and differentiated AD from both clinically diagnosed (receiver operating characteristic area under the curve of 0.894) and autopsy-confirmed frontotemporal lobar degeneration (area under the curve of 0.878). Plasma pTau181 identified individuals who were amyloid β-PET-positive regardless of clinical diagnosis and correlated with cortical tau protein deposition measured by 18F-flortaucipir PET. Plasma pTau181 may be useful to screen for tau pathology associated with AD. Plasma pTau181 concentrations are elevated specifically in patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease compared to those diagnosed with frontotemporal lobar degeneration or elderly controls, supporting its further development as a blood-based biomarker for AD.

Subfields: Physiology, Psychiatry and Mental health, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/274c28c8529beee9e8a31454021c208f7d4ccb2c

Citations in the corpus

• Blood-based biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease: towards clinical implementation. (2021, neutral): “38,50 These associations were observed only in individuals with Aβ pathology, 51 which underpins pTau181’s specificity for Alzheimer’s disease-associated neuropathological changes. pTau181 also differentiated patients with mild cognitive impairment who progressed to Alzheimer’s disease from those…”