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Objective To use digital histology in a large autopsy cohort of Lewy body disorder (LBD) patients with dementia to test the hypotheses that co‐occurring Alzheimer disease (AD) pathology impacts the anatomic distribution of α‐synuclein (SYN) pathology and that co‐occurring neocortical tau pathology in LBDs associates with worse cognitive performance and occurs in a pattern differing from AD. Methods Fifty‐five autopsy‐confirmed LBD (Parkinson disease with dementia, n = 36; dementia with Lewy bodies, n = 19) patients and 25 AD patients were studied. LBD patients were categorized as having moderate/severe AD copathology (SYN + AD = 20) or little/no AD copathology (SYN−AD = 35). Digital measures of tau, β‐amyloid (Aβ), and SYN histopathology in neocortical and subcortical/limbic regions were compared between groups and related to antemortem cognitive testing. Results SYN burden was higher in SYN + AD than SYN−AD in each neocortical region ( F 1, 54 = 5.6–6.0, p 0.2). SYN + AD performed worse than SYN−AD on a temporal lobe–mediated naming task ( t 27 = 2.1, p = 0.04). Antemortem cognitive test scores inversely correlated with tau burden ( r = −0.39 to −0.68, p 0.1). Interpretation LBD patients with AD copathology harbor greater neocortical SYN pathology. Regional tau pathology relates to cognitive performance in LBD dementia, and its distribution may diverge from pure AD. Tau copathology contributes uniquely to the heterogeneity of cognitive impairment in LBD. Ann Neurol 2018; 1–13 ANN NEUROL 2019;85:259–271.
Coughlin et al. (Fri,) studied this question.
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