As people age, a protein called tau that’s involved in Alzheimer’s disease can build up in the brain even when they do not have Alzheimer’s disease. This makes it hard to tell whether tau changes reflect normal aging or the start of Alzheimer’s, which is important for early diagnosis and for choosing the right treatment. This project measures specific fragments of tau in cerebrospinal fluid using a precise technique called mass spectrometry that can distinguish many different forms of tau. By comparing people who carry inherited Alzheimer’s mutations against age-matched non-carriers, and by studying thousands of samples across the normal aging and Alzheimer’s disease spectrum, the team aims to find tau signatures that are unique to the disease rather than to aging alone. They will also test whether these markers track with future memory decline and whether they appear in a separate tau disease linked to repeated head injury. The goal is a test that flags Alzheimer’s-specific tau at its earliest stage.
