Tau PET brain imaging could launch precision medicine era for Alzheimer’s disease
Brain imaging of pathological tau-protein “tangles” reliably predicts the location of future brain atrophy in Alzheimer’s disease patients a year or more in advance, according to a new study by scientists at the University of California San Francisco Memory and Aging Center. In contrast, the location of amyloid “plaques,” which have been the focus of Alzheimer’s research and drug development for decades, was found to be of little utility in predicting how damage would unfold as the disease progressed.The results, published Jan. 1, in Science Translational Medicine, support researchers’ growing recognition that tau drives brain degeneration in Alzheimer’s disease more directly than amy
