Increased levels of plasma total tau in adult Down syndrome

Kasai, Takashi and Tatebe, Harutsugu and Kondo, Masaki and Ishii, Ryotaro and Ohmichi, Takuma and Yeung, Wing Tung Esther and Morimoto, Masafumi and Chiyonobu, Tomohiro and Terada, Naoto and Allsop, David and Nakagawa, Masanori and Mizuno, Toshiki and Tokuda, Takahiko (2017) Increased levels of plasma total tau in adult Down syndrome. PLoS ONE, 12 (11): e0188802. ISSN 1932-6203

Abstract

Down syndrome (DS) is the most prevalent chromosomal abnormality. Early-onset dementia with the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) frequently develops in DS. Reliable blood biomarkers are needed to support the diagnosis for dementia in DS, since positron emission tomography or cerebrospinal fluid sampling is burdensome, particularly for patients with DS. Plasma t-tau is one of the established biomarkers for the diagnosis of AD, suggesting the potential value of t-tau as a biomarker for dementia in DS. In this study, plasma levels of t-tau in 21 patients with DS and 22 control participants were measured. We observed significantly increased plasma t-tau levels in the DS group compared to those in the control group. Moreover, age dependent correlation of plasma t-tau was only found in the DS group, and not in the control group. These findings suggest that elevated plasma t-tau levels reflect AD pathology and therefore have potential as an objective biomarker to detect dementia in adult DS.