So for me, the main advantage of tau-PET is that it is the technique that basically connects the presence of pathology with the presence of symptoms, right? I mean, the first marker of pathology we had was amyloid-PET and that’s great because it’s super specific for amyloid plaques. The problem is that the presence of amyloid pathology is not always linked to the presence of cognitive impairment...
So for me, the main advantage of tau-PET is that it is the technique that basically connects the presence of pathology with the presence of symptoms, right? I mean, the first marker of pathology we had was amyloid-PET and that’s great because it’s super specific for amyloid plaques. The problem is that the presence of amyloid pathology is not always linked to the presence of cognitive impairment.
So that’s a problem for clinicians, right? Because if you see your patient has elevated brain amyloid, okay, in general you cannot conclude that this elevated amyloid is causing the cognitive symptoms your patient is currently having. Right? So that’s the main problem of amyloid-PET. So with tau-PET, tau pathology it is the second hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. With tau-PET, we also have something that is very specific for Alzheimer’s disease, but at the same time it’s much more strongly correlated with the presence of cognitive impairment, right? So every time you see in general, okay, again, every time you see an elevated or a positive tau-PET scan, you can be much more certain that the cause of cognitive impairment that is in your patient is due to Alzheimer’s disease pathology, in this case to tau pathology. So that’s the main advantage compared to amyloid-PET.
