Related Experiment Video
Updated: Sep 15, 2025
Symmetric Bihemispheric Postmortem Brain Cutting to Study Healthy and Pathological Brain Conditions in Humans
Published on: December 18, 2016
Plasma biomarkers, brain amyloid pathology, and cortical thickness in a diverse middle-aged community cohort: the
Shayna T Brodman1, Nicholas Heaton2, Gallen Triana-Baltzer3
1Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.
Introduction:
We evaluated plasma biomarker association with, and classification accuracies for, Aβ-PET and cortical thickness in the biracial HCP-CoBRA cohort (53% B/AA and 47% NHW).
Methods:
In n=218 participants (age 62 [range: 57-71] years, 65% female and 15% Aβ PET-positive), plasma biomarkers (p-tau181, p-tau217, p-tau231, GFAP, NfL, Aβ42/Aβ40) were compared to Aβ-PET and MRI neuroimaging indicators.
Results:
P-tau217 (Janssen and ALZpath [AUCs=0.915-0.919]) had high sensitivity and specificity (>85%) for Aβ-PET status. All biomarkers except p-tau231 ruled out Aβ-pathology (NPV>95%) but only Janssen p-tau217+ was good for confirmation (PPV=0.909). Plasma biomarkers performed poorly for predicting cortical thickness but were elevated according to joint Aβ-PET-neurodegeneration profiles. Biomarker accuracies for Aβ-PET positivity were unaffected by self-identified race, except ALZpath p-tau217(p=0.024). However, correlations with Aβ-PET varied by self-identified race.
Discussion:
P-tau217 is a promising tool for Alzheimer's disease-related Aβ pathology in older/middle-aged individuals. However, apparent race-related performances should be further studied.
