Rotation errors in path integration are associated with Alzheimer's disease tau pathology: a cross-sectional study.

Abstract

Background: Early Alzheimer's disease diagnosis is crucial for preventive therapy development. Standard neuropsychological evaluation does not identify clinically normal individuals with brain amyloidosis, the first stage of the pathology, defined as preclinical Alzheimer's disease. Spatial navigation assessment, in particular path integration, appears promising to detect preclinical symptoms, as the medial temporal lobe plays a key role in navigation and is the first cortical region affected by tau pathology.

Methods: We have conducted a cross-sectional study. We related the path integration performance of 102 individuals without dementia, aged over 50, to amyloid and tau pathologies, measured using positron emission tomography. We included 75 clinically normal individuals (19 with brain amyloidosis, 56 without) and 27 individuals with mild cognitive impairment (18 with brain amyloidosis, 9 without). We fitted linear mixed models to predict the path integration performances according to amyloid status or tau pathology in the medial temporal lobal, adjusting for age, gender, cognitive status, education, and video game experience. We decomposed the error into rotation and distance errors.

Results: We observed that clinically normal adults with brain amyloidosis (preclinical Alzheimer's disease) had spatial navigation deficits when relying only on self-motion cues. However, they were able to use a landmark to reduce their errors. Individuals with mild cognitive impairment had deficits in path integration that did not improve when a landmark was added in the environment. The amyloid status did not influence performance among individuals with mild cognitive impairment. Among all individuals, rotation, but not distance, errors increased with the level of tau pathology in the medial temporal lobe.

Conclusion: Our results suggest that path integration performance in an environment without external cues allows identifying individuals with preclinical Alzheimer's disease, before overt episodic memory impairment is noticeable. Specifically, we demonstrated that poor angular estimation is an early cognitive marker of tau pathology, whereas distance estimation relates to older ages, not to Alzheimer's disease.

Trial registration: Eudra-CT 2018-003473-94.