Tau and Aβ imaging, CSF measures, and cognition in Alzheimer's disease
By M. Brier, Brian A. Gordon, Karl Friedrichsen, J. McCarthy, Ari Stern, Jon J. Christensen, Christopher J. Owen, Patricia Aldea, Yi Su, Jason J Hassenstab and 6 more. Science Translational Medicine, 2016
654 citations recorded by the source corpus.
PET imaging of pathological tau correlates more closely with Alzheimer’s disease–related cognitive impairment than does imaging of β-amyloid. A window into Alzheimer’s disease Alzheimer’s disease is pathologically defined by the accumulation of β-amyloid (Aβ) plaques and tau tangles. The cognitive and pathological correlates of Aβ deposition have been well studied owing to the availability of PET imaging ligands. Using newly available tau imaging agents, Brier et al. now explore relationships among tau pathology and Aβ with PET imaging, cerebrospinal fluid measures of disease, and cognition. Overall, tau imaging provided a more robust predictor of disease status than did Aβ imaging. Thus, whereas Aβ imaging provides a good marker for early disease state, tau imaging is a more robust predictor of disease progression. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is characterized by two molecular pathologies: cerebral β-amyloidosis in the form of β-amyloid (Aβ) plaques and tauopathy in the form of neurofibrillary tangles, neuritic plaques, and neuropil threads. Until recently, only Aβ could be studied in humans using positron emission tomography (PET) imaging owing to a lack of tau PET imaging agents. Clinical pathological studies have linked tau pathology closely to the onset and progression of cognitive symptoms in patients with AD. We report PET imaging of tau and Aβ in a cohort of cognitively normal older adults and those with mild AD. Multivariate analyses identified unique disease-related stereotypical spatial patterns (topographies) for deposition of tau and Aβ. These PET imaging tau and Aβ topographies were spatially distinct but correlated with disease progression. Cerebrospinal fluid measures of tau, often used to stage preclinical AD, correlated with tau deposition in the temporal lobe. Tau deposition in the temporal lobe more closely tracked dementia status and was a better predictor of cognitive performance than Aβ deposition in any region of the brain. These data support models of AD where tau pathology closely tracks changes in brain function that are responsible for the onset of early symptoms in AD.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Physiology, Psychiatry and Mental health
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/34bcb25cf0085191960ea1163e312b57760d38e2
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In Cognitive Neuroscience
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Citations in the corpus
- Comparison of multiple tau-PET measures as biomarkers in aging and Alzheimer's disease (2017, methodology): “(Brier et al., 2016; Johnson et al., 2016; Ossenkoppele et al., 2016), in contrast to weaker associations seen with Aβ.”
- NIA-AA Research Framework: Toward a biological definition of Alzheimer’s disease (2018, critical): “Because CSF P-tau and T-tau are highly correlated in AD and are equally correlated with tau PET [124], they do not seem to provide independent information in AD.”