Tau Protein May Be Key Driver of Alzheimer’s Symptoms

One of the telltale signs of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is sticky plaques of ß-amyloid protein, which form around neurons and are thought by a large number of scientists to bog down information processing and kill cells. For more than a decade, however, other researchers have fingered a second protein called tau, found inside brain cells, as a possible culprit. Now, a new imaging study of 10 people with mild AD suggests that tau deposits—not amyloid—are closely linked to symptoms such as memory loss and dementia. Although this evidence won’t itself resolve the amyloid-tau debate, the finding could spur more research into new, tau-targeting treatments and lead to better diagnostic tools, researchers say.

Scientists have long used an imaging technique called positron emission tomography (PET) to visualize ß-amyloid deposits marked by radioactive chemical tags in the brains of people with AD. Combined with postmortem analyses of brain tissue, these studies have demonstrated that people with AD have far more ß-amyloid plaques in their brains than healthy people, at least as a general rule. But they have also revealed a puzzle: Roughly 30% of people without any signs of dementia have brains “chock-full” of ß-amyloid at autopsy, says neurologist Beau Ances at Washington University in St. Louis in Missouri.

Read the article in its entirety on sciencemag.org:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/tau-protein-not-amyloid-may-be-key-driver-alzheimer-s-symptoms