Publications by authors named "Theresa Connors Stewart"

Article Synopsis
  • Tau protein is key in various neurological disorders, but the mechanisms of its progression and spread in the brain remain unclear due to difficulties in analyzing tau aggregates.
  • Using advanced techniques like micro-x-ray diffraction (µXRD) and micro-X-ray fluorescence (μXRF), researchers studied tau lesions in a 79-year-old male with dementia, revealing distinct forms of tau and their locations in the brain.
  • Findings indicated that different types of tau lesions had unique chemical environments, affecting their structure and spread, with higher fibrillar tau density linked to greater sulfur deposition and the presence of metals like zinc and calcium in all tau lesions.
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Importance: Factors associated with synapse loss beyond amyloid-β plaques and neurofibrillary tangles may more closely correlate with the emergence of cognitive deficits in Alzheimer disease (AD) and be relevant for early therapeutic intervention.

Objective: To investigate whether accumulation of tau oligomers in synapses is associated with excessive synapse elimination by microglia or astrocytes and with cognitive outcomes (dementia vs no dementia [hereinafter termed resilient]) of individuals with equal burdens of AD neuropathologic changes at autopsy.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This cross-sectional postmortem study included 40 human brains from the Massachusetts Alzheimer Disease Research Center Brain Bank with Braak III to IV stages of tau pathology but divergent antemortem cognition (dementia vs resilient) and cognitively normal controls with negligible AD neuropathologic changes.

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