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Predicting future rates of tau accumulation on PET.

ABSTRACT: Clinical trials with anti-tau drugs will need to target individuals at risk of accumulating tau. Our objective was to identify variables available in a research setting that predict future rates of tau PET accumulation separately among individuals who were either cognitively unimpaired or cognitively impaired. All 337 participants had: a baseline study visit with MRI, amyloid PET, and tau PET exams, at least one follow-up tau PET exam; and met clinical criteria for membership in one of two clinical diagnostic groups: cognitively unimpaired (n?=?203); or cognitively impaired (n?=?134, a combined group of participants with either mild cognitive impairment or dementia with Alzheimer's clinical syndrome). Our primary analyses were in these two clinical groups; however, we also evaluated subgroups dividing the unimpaired group by normal/abnormal amyloid PET and the impaired group by clinical phenotype (mild cognitive impairment, amnestic dementia, and non-amnestic dementia). Linear mixed effects models were used to estimate associations between age, sex, education, APOE genotype, amyloid and tau PET standardized uptake value ratio (SUVR), cognitive performance, cortical thickness, and white matter hyperintensity volume at baseline, and the rate of subsequent tau PET accumulation. Log-transformed tau PET SUVR was used as the response and rates were summarized as annual per cent change. A temporal lobe tau PET meta-region of interest was used. In the cognitively unimpaired group, only higher baseline amyloid PET was a significant independent predictor of higher tau accumulation rates (P?

SUBMITTER: Jack CR

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7586089 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Predicting future rates of tau accumulation on PET.

Jack Clifford R CR Wiste Heather J HJ Weigand Stephen D SD Therneau Terry M TM Lowe Val J VJ Knopman David S DS Botha Hugo H Graff-Radford Jonathan J Jones David T DT Ferman Tanis J TJ Boeve Bradley F BF Kantarci Kejal K Vemuri Prashanthi P Mielke Michelle M MM Whitwell Jennifer J Josephs Keith K Schwarz Christopher G CG Senjem Matthew L ML Gunter Jeffrey L JL Petersen Ronald C RC

Brain : a journal of neurology 20201001 10

Clinical trials with anti-tau drugs will need to target individuals at risk of accumulating tau. Our objective was to identify variables available in a research setting that predict future rates of tau PET accumulation separately among individuals who were either cognitively unimpaired or cognitively impaired. All 337 participants had: a baseline study visit with MRI, amyloid PET, and tau PET exams, at least one follow-up tau PET exam; and met clinical criteria for membership in one of two clini ...[more]

PMID: 33094327

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Project description:Different tau biomarkers become abnormal at different stages of Alzheimer's disease, with CSF phospho-tau typically becoming elevated at subthreshold levels of tau-PET binding. To capitalize on the temporal order of tau biomarker-abnormality and capture the earliest changes of tau accumulation, we implemented an observational study design to examine longitudinal changes in tau-PET, cortical thickness and cognitive decline in amyloid-β-positive individuals with elevated CSF p-tau levels (P+) but subthreshold Tau-PET retention (T-). To this end, individuals without dementia (i.e. cognitively unimpaired or mild cognitive impairment, n = 231) were selected from the BioFINDER-2 study. Amyloid-β-positive (A+) individuals were categorized into biomarker groups based on cut-offs for abnormal CSF p-tau217 and 18F-RO948 (Tau) PET, yielding groups of tau-concordant-negative (A+P-T-; n = 30), tau-discordant (i.e. A+P+T-; n = 48) and tau-concordant-positive (A+P+T+; n = 18) individuals. In addition, 135 amyloid-β-negative, tau-negative, cognitively unimpaired individuals served as controls. Differences in annual change in regional tau-PET, cortical thickness and cognition between the groups were assessed using general linear models, adjusted for age, sex, clinical diagnosis and (for cognitive measures only) education. Mean follow-up time was ∼2 years. Longitudinal increase in tau-PET was faster in the A+P+T- group than in the control and A+P-T- groups across medial temporal and neocortical regions, with the highest accumulation rates in the medial temporal lobe. The A+P+T- group showed a slower rate of increase in tau-PET compared to the A+P+T+ group, primarily in neocortical regions. We did not detect differences in yearly change in cortical thickness or in cognitive decline between the A+P+T- and A+P-T- groups. The A+P+T+ group, however, showed faster cognitive decline compared to all other groups. Altogether, these findings suggest that the A+P+T- biomarker profile in persons without dementia is associated with an isolated effect on increased tau-PET accumulation rates but not on cortical thinning and cognitive decline. While this suggests that the tau-discordant biomarker profile is not strongly associated with short-term clinical decline, this group does represent an interesting population for monitoring the effects of interventions with disease-modifying agents on tau accumulation in early Alzheimer's disease, and for examining the emergence of tau aggregates in Alzheimer's disease. Further, we suggest updating the AT(N) criteria for Alzheimer's disease biomarker classification to APT(N).

Project description:A classical early sign of typical Alzheimer's disease is memory decline, which has been linked to the aggregation of tau in the medial temporal lobe. Verbal delayed free recall and recognition tests have consistently probed useful to detect early memory decline, and there is substantial debate on how performance, particularly in recognition tests, is differentially affected through health and disease in older adults. Using in vivo PET-Braak staging, we investigated delayed recall and recognition memory dysfunction across the Alzheimer's disease spectrum. Our cross-sectional study included 144 cognitively unimpaired elderly, 39 amyloid-β+ individuals with mild cognitive impairment and 29 amyloid-β+ Alzheimer's disease patients from the Translational Biomarkers in Aging and Dementia cohort, who underwent [18F]MK6240 tau and [18F]AZD4694 amyloid PET imaging, structural MRI and memory assessments. We applied non-parametric comparisons, correlation analyses, regression models and voxel-wise analyses. In comparison with PET-Braak Stage 0, we found that reduced, but not clinically significant, delayed recall starts at PET-Braak Stage II (adjusted P < 0.0015), and that recognition (adjusted P = 0.011) displayed a significant decline starting at PET-Braak Stage IV. While performance in both delayed recall and recognition related to tau in nearly the same cortical areas, further analyses showed that delayed recall rendered stronger associations in areas of early tau accumulation, whereas recognition displayed stronger correlations in mostly posterior neocortical regions. Our results support the notion that delayed recall and recognition deficits are predominantly associated with tau load in allocortical and neocortical areas, respectively. Overall, delayed recall seems to be more dependent on the integrity of anterior medial temporal lobe structures, while recognition appears to be more affected by tau accumulation in cortices beyond medial temporal regions.

Project description:A major unanswered question in the dementia field is whether cognitively unimpaired individuals who harbor both Alzheimer's disease neuropathological hallmarks (that is, amyloid-β plaques and tau neurofibrillary tangles) can preserve their cognition over time or are destined to decline. In this large multicenter amyloid and tau positron emission tomography (PET) study (n = 1,325), we examined the risk for future progression to mild cognitive impairment and the rate of cognitive decline over time among cognitively unimpaired individuals who were amyloid PET-positive (A+) and tau PET-positive (T+) in the medial temporal lobe (A+TMTL+) and/or in the temporal neocortex (A+TNEO-T+) and compared them with A+T- and A-T- groups. Cox proportional-hazards models showed a substantially increased risk for progression to mild cognitive impairment in the A+TNEO-T+ (hazard ratio (HR) = 19.2, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 10.9-33.7), A+TMTL+ (HR = 14.6, 95% CI = 8.1-26.4) and A+T- (HR = 2.4, 95% CI = 1.4-4.3) groups versus the A-T- (reference) group. Both A+TMTL+ (HR = 6.0, 95% CI = 3.4-10.6) and A+TNEO-T+ (HR = 7.9, 95% CI = 4.7-13.5) groups also showed faster clinical progression to mild cognitive impairment than the A+T- group. Linear mixed-effect models indicated that the A+TNEO-T+ (β = -0.056 ± 0.005, T = -11.55, P < 0.001), A+TMTL+ (β = -0.024 ± 0.005, T = -4.72, P < 0.001) and A+T- (β = -0.008 ± 0.002, T = -3.46, P < 0.001) groups showed significantly faster longitudinal global cognitive decline compared to the A-T- (reference) group (all P < 0.001). Both A+TNEO-T+ (P < 0.001) and A+TMTL+ (P = 0.002) groups also progressed faster than the A+T- group. In summary, evidence of advanced Alzheimer's disease pathological changes provided by a combination of abnormal amyloid and tau PET examinations is strongly associated with short-term (that is, 3-5 years) cognitive decline in cognitively unimpaired individuals and is therefore of high clinical relevance.

Project description:We introduce a novel computational framework to enable automated identification of texture and shape features of lesions on (18)F-FDG-PET images through a graph-based image segmentation method. The proposed framework predicts future morphological changes of lesions with high accuracy. The presented methodology has several benefits over conventional qualitative and semi-quantitative methods, due to its fully quantitative nature and high accuracy in each step of (i) detection, (ii) segmentation, and (iii) feature extraction. To evaluate our proposed computational framework, thirty patients received 2 (18)F-FDG-PET scans (60 scans total), at two different time points. Metastatic papillary renal cell carcinoma, cerebellar hemongioblastoma, non-small cell lung cancer, neurofibroma, lymphomatoid granulomatosis, lung neoplasm, neuroendocrine tumor, soft tissue thoracic mass, nonnecrotizing granulomatous inflammation, renal cell carcinoma with papillary and cystic features, diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, metastatic alveolar soft part sarcoma, and small cell lung cancer were included in this analysis. The radiotracer accumulation in patients' scans was automatically detected and segmented by the proposed segmentation algorithm. Delineated regions were used to extract shape and textural features, with the proposed adaptive feature extraction framework, as well as standardized uptake values (SUV) of uptake regions, to conduct a broad quantitative analysis. Evaluation of segmentation results indicates that our proposed segmentation algorithm has a mean dice similarity coefficient of 85.75 ± 1.75%. We found that 28 of 68 extracted imaging features were correlated well with SUV(max) (p<0.05), and some of the textural features (such as entropy and maximum probability) were superior in predicting morphological changes of radiotracer uptake regions longitudinally, compared to single intensity feature such as SUV(max). We also found that integrating textural features with SUV measurements significantly improves the prediction accuracy of morphological changes (Spearman correlation coefficient = 0.8715, p<2e-16).

Project description:Background18F-flortaucipir PET received FDA approval to visualize aggregated neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs) in brains of adult patients with cognitive impairment being evaluated for Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, manufacturer's guidelines for visual interpretation of 18F-flortaucipir PET differ from how 18F-flortaucipir PET has been measured in research settings using standardized uptake value ratios (SUVRs). How visual interpretation relates to 18F-flortaucipir PET SUVR, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarkers, or longitudinal clinical assessment is not well understood.ObjectiveWe compare various diagnostic methods in participants enrolled in longitudinal observational studies of aging and memory (n = 189, 23 were cognitively impaired).MethodsParticipants had tau PET, Aβ PET, MRI, and clinical and cognitive evaluation within 18 months (n = 189); the majority (n = 144) also underwent lumbar puncture. Two radiologists followed manufacturer's guidelines for 18F-flortaucipir PET visual interpretation.ResultsVisual interpretation had high agreement with SUVR (98.4%)and moderate agreement with CSF p-tau181 (86.1%). Two participants demonstrated 18F-flortaucipir uptake from meningiomas. Visual interpretation could not predict follow-up clinical assessment in 9.52% of cases.ConclusionVisual interpretation was highly consistent with SUVR (discordant participants had hemorrhagic infarcts or occipital-predominant AD NFT deposition) and moderately consistent with CSF p-tau181 (discordant participants had AD pathophysiology not detectable on tau PET). However, close association between AD NFT deposition and clinical onset in group-level studies does not necessarily hold at the individual level, with discrepancies arising from atypical AD, vascular dementia, or frontotemporal dementia. A better understanding of relationships across imaging, CSF biomarkers, and clinical assessment is needed to provide appropriate diagnoses for these individuals.

Dataset Information

Predicting future rates of tau accumulation on PET.

Publications

Predicting future rates of tau accumulation on PET.

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