White Matter Microstructure and Alzheimer’s Disease Pathology Insights from Tractography and PET - Video

Amyloid-beta and tau proteins are the main pathological hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), which start to deposit in the brain years before any clinical symptoms. Both proteins tend to accumulate in regions that are connected by well-defined anatomical white matter bundles. However, measures of white matter microstructure in relation to AD pathology are not often incorporated in studies. The first part of the presentation will give an overview of the current state of knowledge with regards to the links between pathology and diffusion-based measures of white matter, with a particular focus on the preclinical phase of AD. The second part will discuss novel work where we investigated the direct associations between white matter microstructure in key bundles affected in AD and amyloid and tau pathology in two cohorts of individuals at risk of AD. Biography: Alexa Pichet Binette recently graduated from McGill University where she obtained her PhD in neuroscience under the supervision of Dr. Sylvia Villeneuve. Her thesis focussed on identifying features from neuroimaging and behavior related to aging and Alzheimer’s disease. She mainly used multimodal neuroimaging techniques ranging from MRI and PET in her studies. In March 2021 she joined the group of Oskar Hansson and the BioFinder study at Lund University, Sweden as a postdoctoral fellow where she will continue to work on Alzheimer’s disease.