Brain vasculature accumulates tau and is spatially related to tau tangle pathology in Alzheimer’s disease

Abstract

Insoluble pathogenic proteins accumulate along blood vessels in conditions of cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA), exerting a toxic effect on vascular cells and impacting cerebral homeostasis. In this work, we provide new evidence from three-dimensional human brain histology that tau protein, the main component of neurofibrillary tangles, can similarly accumulate along brain vascular segments. We quantitatively assessed n = 6 Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and n = 6 normal aging control brains and saw that tau-positive blood vessel segments were present in all AD cases. Tau-positive vessels are enriched for tau at levels higher than the surrounding tissue and appear to affect arterioles across cortical layers (I–V). Further, vessels isolated from these AD tissues were enriched for N-terminal tau and tau phosphorylated at T181 and T217. Importantly, tau-positive vessels are associated with local areas of increased tau neurofibrillary tangles. This suggests that accumulation of tau around blood vessels may reflect a local clearance failure. In sum, these data indicate that tau, like amyloid beta, accumulates along blood vessels and may exert a significant influence on vasculature in the setting of AD.