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Brain vasculature accumulates tau and is spatially related to tau tangle pathology in Alzheimer's disease
Acta Neuropathol. 2024 Jun 17;147(1):101. doi: 10.1007/s00401-024-02751-9.
Zachary Hoglund 1, Nancy Ruiz-Uribe 1 2, Eric Del Sastre 1, Benjamin Woost 1, Elizabeth Bader 1, Joshua Bailey 1, Bradley T Hyman 1 2, Theodore Zwang # 3 4, Rachel E Bennett # 5 6
Abstract:
Insoluble pathogenic proteins accumulate along blood vessels in conditions of cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA), exerting a toxic effect on vascular cells and impacting cerebral homeostasis. In this work, we provide new evidence from three-dimensional human brain histology that tau protein, the main component of neurofibrillary tangles, can similarly accumulate along brain vascular segments. We quantitatively assessed n = 6 Alzheimer's disease (AD), and n = 6 normal aging control brains and saw that tau-positive blood vessel segments were present in all AD cases. Tau-positive vessels are enriched for tau at levels higher than the surrounding tissue and appear to affect arterioles across cortical layers (I-V). Further, vessels isolated from these AD tissues were enriched for N-terminal tau and tau phosphorylated at T181 and T217. Importantly, tau-positive vessels are associated with local areas of increased tau neurofibrillary tangles. This suggests that accumulation of tau around blood vessels may reflect a local clearance failure. In sum, these data indicate that tau, like amyloid beta, accumulates along blood vessels and may exert a significant influence on vasculature in the setting of AD.
PMID: 38884806
Free Full-Text: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11182845/
Tags: Alzheimer’s, blood vessels, humans, tau