Fig. 5

Comparisons of pathological features across clinical stages

Plots portray cortical/subcortical grey matter tau burden (a), cortical/subcortical neuronal degeneration (b) and juxtacortical/subcortical white matter tau burden (c) across clinical stages, independently of region and MAPT variant. The early-stage group had lower tau burden compared to intermediate- and end-stage groups in cortical (p ≤ 0.021) and subcortical (p < 0.001) grey matter, as well as in juxtacortical (p ≤ 0.010) and subcortical (p ≤ 0.013) white matter. Neuronal degeneration was less severe in the early-stage group compared to intermediate- (p = 0.001) and end-stage (p < 0.001) in cortical regions, and compared to end-stage only in subcortical grey matter regions (p < 0.001)

Legend: %AO = percentage of area occupied (by tau-positive pixels)

Tau burden (y-axis, a, c) corresponds to the digitally measured %AO by tau pathology after applying natural logarithmic transformation

Reported p-values were obtained using linear mixed modelling for tau burden or ordinal mixed modelling for neuronal degeneration score

*p < 0.05 compared to the early-stage group

**p < 0.01 compared to the early stage group

***p < 0.001 compared to the early-stage group