Neuroinflammation and protein aggregation co-localize across the frontotemporal dementia spectrum.

Abstract

The clinical syndromes of frontotemporal dementia are clinically and neuropathologically heterogeneous, but processes such as neuroinflammation may be common across the disease spectrum. We investigated how neuroinflammation relates to the aggregation of Tau and TDP-43 in frontotemporal dementia, and to the heterogeneity of clinical disease. We used positron emission tomography in vivo with (a) [11C]PK-11195, a marker of activated microglia and a proxy index of neuroinflammation, and (b) [18F]AV-1451, a radioligand with increased binding to pathologically affected regions in tauopathies and diseases associated with TDP-43 protein aggregation, and which is used as a surrogate marker of non-{beta}-amyloid protein aggregation. We assessed 31 patients with frontotemporal dementia (10 with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia, 11 with the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia and 10 with the non-fluent variant of primary progressive aphasia), 28 of whom underwent both [18F]AV-1451 and [11C]PK-11195 PET, and matched controls (14 for [18F]AV-1451 and 15 for [11C]PK-11195). We used univariate region-of-interest analyses, and multivariate analysis of the distribution of binding that explicitly control for individual differences in ligand affinity for TDP-43 and different Tau isoforms. We found differences between patients and controls in frontotemporal regions for both neuroinflammation and protein aggregation, and a strong positive correlation between these two processes in all disease groups. Despite this regional co-localisation, the multivariate distribution of [11C]PK-11195 binding related better to clinical heterogeneity than did the distribution of [18F]AV-1451: distinct spatial modes of neuroinflammation were associated with different frontotemporal dementia syndromes and supported accurate group classification of participants. These in vivo findings indicate a close association between neuroinflammation and protein aggregation in frontotemporal dementia. The inflammatory component may be important in shaping the clinical and neuropathological patterns of the diverse clinical syndromes of frontotemporal dementia.