First‐of‐its‐kind identification of two novel tau mutations associated with cognitive resilience to Alzheimer’s disease neuropathology

Description

Danielle Jamison and Giulio Taglialatela published this study in two thousand twenty-five on two new gene changes tied to staying sharp despite Alzheimer's damage. About a third of older brains show full Alzheimer's harm at death in people who never lost their thinking.

The team read the tau gene in brain tissue from seven such resilient people. They found two changes in the gene that no one had reported before. Both changes appear in scattered cells, like a mosaic, and both were judged likely to alter how tau works. One sits right next to the short stretch that lets tau stack into tangles. The authors argue that a weaker tau may explain why these people kept their minds. If so, copying that weakness could be a route to new drugs.

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Source: https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC11713714