- Coughlin, David G;
- Phillips, Jeffrey S;
- Roll, Emily;
- Peterson, Claire;
- Lobrovich, Rebecca;
- Rascovsky, Katya;
- Ungrady, Molly;
- Wolk, David A;
- Das, Sandhitsu;
- Weintraub, Daniel;
- Lee, Edward B;
- Trojanowski, John Q;
- Shaw, Leslie M;
- Vaishnavi, Sanjeev;
- Siderowf, Andrew;
- Nasrallah, Ilya M;
- Irwin, David J;
- McMillan, Corey T;
- Initiative, Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging
We compared regional retention of 18F-flortaucipir between 20 patients with Lewy body disorders (LBD), 12 Alzheimer's disease patients with positive amyloid positron emission tomography (PET) scans (AD+Aβ) and 15 healthy controls with negative amyloid PET scans (HC-Aβ). In LBD subjects, we compared the relationship between 18F-flortaucipir retention and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) tau, cognitive performance, and neuropathological tau at autopsy. The LBD cohort was stratified using an Aβ42 cut-off of 192 pg/mL to enrich for groups likely harboring tau pathology (LBD+Aβ = 11, LBD-Aβ = 9). 18F-flortaucipir retention was higher in LBD+AB than HC-Aβ in five, largely temporal-parietal regions with sparing of medial temporal regions. Higher retention was associated with higher CSF total-tau levels (p = 0.04), poorer domain-specific cognitive performance (p = 0.02-0.04), and greater severity of neuropathological tau in corresponding regions. While 18F-flortaucipir retention in LBD is intermediate between healthy controls and AD, retention relates to cognitive impairment, CSF total-tau, and neuropathological tau. Future work in larger autopsy-validated cohorts is needed to define LBD-specific tau biomarker profiles.