Multimodal spatial gradients to explain regional susceptibility to fibrillar tau in Alzheimer's disease

Abstract

Introduction: In Alzheimer's disease (AD), fibrillar tau gradually progresses from initial seed to larger brain area. However, those brain properties underlying the region-dependent susceptibility to tau accumulation remain unclear.

Methods: We constructed multimodal spatial gradients to characterize molecular properties and connectomic architecture. A predictive model for regional tau deposition was developed by integrating embeddings in the principal gradients of global connectome gradients with gene expression, neurotransmitters, myelin, and amyloid-beta. The model was trained on amyloid-beta-positive participants from Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) and externally validated in independent datasets.

Results: The combination of gradients explained up to 77.7% of cross-sectional and 77.3% of longitudinal inter-regional variance of tau deposition. Gene set enrichment analysis of a major gene expression gradient points to synaptic transmission to confer increased susceptibility to tau.

Discussion: Our findings reveal a spatially heterogeneous molecular landscape shaping regional susceptibility to tau deposition, presenting a powerful system-level explanatory model of tau pathology in AD.

Highlights: Spatial gradients of fundamental molecular brain properties associated with tau pathology. The explanatory power showed high consistency across studies. Genetic analyses suggested that synapse expression plays a vital role in tau accumulation.

Keywords: Alzheimer's disease; functional connectivity; gene expression; multimodal gradients; neurotransmitters; predictive model; tau positron emission tomography.