Cerebrospinal fluid levels of synaptic and neuronal integrity correlate with gray matter volume and amyloid load in the precuneus of cognitively intact older adults

Abstract

The main pathophysiological alterations of Alzheimer s disease (AD) include loss of neuronal and synaptic integrity, amyloidogenic processing, and neuroinflammation. Similar alterations can, however, also be observed in cognitively intact older subjects and may prelude the clinical manifestation of AD. The objectives of this prospective cross‐sectional study in a cohort of 38 cognitively intact older adults were twofold: (i) to investigate the latent relationship among cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarkers reflecting the main pathophysiological processes of AD, and (ii) to assess the correlation between these biomarkers and gray matter volume as well as amyloid load. All subjects underwent extensive neuropsychological examinations, CSF sampling, [18F]‐flutemetamol amyloid positron emission tomography, and T1‐weighted magnetic resonance imaging. A factor analysis revealed one factor that explained most of the variance in the CSF biomarker dataset clustering t‐tau, α‐synuclein, p‐tau181, neurogranin, BACE1, visinin‐like protein 1, chitinase‐3‐like protein 1 (YKL‐40), Aβ1–40 and Aβ1–38. Higher scores on this factor correlated with lower gray matter volume and with higher amyloid load in the precuneus. At the level of individual CSF biomarkers, levels of visinin‐like protein 1, neurogranin, BACE1, Aβ1–40, Aβ1–38, and YKL‐40 all correlated inversely with gray matter volume of the precuneus. These findings demonstrate that in cognitively intact older subjects, CSF levels of synaptic and neuronal integrity biomarkers, amyloidogenic processing and measures of innate immunity (YKL‐40) display a latent structure of common variance, which is associated with loss of structural integrity of brain regions implicated in the earliest stages of AD.