HAI Book 2025 - Flipbook - Page 554
Schweitzer, Noah
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Astrocyte reactivity explains tau-related effects on hippocampal
dysfunction and longitudinal atrophy in preclinical Alzheimer9s disease
Noah Schweitzer1, Bistra Iordanova1, Chang-le Chen1, Hecheng Jin1, Rebecca Thurston2, Brian
Lopresti3, Beth Snitz4, Dana Tudorascu2, Annie Cohen2, M. Ilyas Kamboh5, Edythe HalliganEddy2, Thomas Karikari2, Victor Villemagne2, Howard Aizenstein1,2, Minjie Wu1
1
Department of Bioengineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, US
Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA, US
3
Department of Radiology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA, US
4
Department of Neurology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA, US
5
Department of Human Genetics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, US
2
Astrocytes become reactive early in Alzheimer9s Disease (AD) as amyloid-´ (A´) begins to deposit in the brain. Few
studies have explored how reactive astrocytes in humans relate to hippocampal activity measured with fMRI in
pre-clinical AD. Our study recruited 41 cognitively unimpaired participants (N=22 female, ages 65-82 years) who
completed a neuropsychological battery and a face-name associative memory fMRI task and provided blood
plasma samples to measure levels of glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), phosphorylated tau217 (p-tau217) and ptau181. Participants underwent 2-3 follow-up visits where T1-weighted MRIs were acquired 2-3 years apart. A
medial split of GFAP was performed and each subject was classified as either
