In Vivo Tau, Amyloid, and Gray Matter Profiles in the Aging Brain.
Jorge SepulcreAaron P SchultzMert SabuncuTeresa Gomez-IslaJasmeer P ChhatwalAlex BeckerReisa SperlingKeith A JohnsonPublished in: The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience (2017)
It has been postulated that Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology interacts and resides within system-level circuits of the human brain, long before the onset of cognitive symptoms. However, a side-by-side comparison of tissue loss, amyloid-β, and Tau deposition in early stages of the disease has been precluded until the recent advent of Tau tracer-based neuroimaging. In this study, we used Tau positron emission tomography and network analyses to disentangle these pathological relationships. We found that Tau and amyloid-β deposits are associated with distinctive spatial patterns of brain tissue loss. Moreover, we uncovered the network interdigitations of Tau and amyloid-β in the cortical mantle. These findings contribute significantly to our understanding of how two main hallmarks of AD pathology propagate across the elderly human brain.