Overview

• A team at the National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology scanned 52 individuals with late-life depression or bipolar disorder and 47 healthy controls using PET imaging and validated findings through postmortem analysis.
• Nearly 50 percent of patients with late-onset mood disorders showed elevated tau pathology in the frontal cortex, compared with about 15 percent of healthy participants.
• Amyloid beta deposits were present in 29 percent of mood disorder cases versus just 2 percent of controls, linking these psychiatric symptoms to Alzheimer’s-associated processes.
• Review of 208 autopsy cases confirmed that mood disturbances preceded observable cognitive or motor signs of dementia by an average of 7.3 years.
• Authors recommend incorporating tau-PET scans into psychiatric evaluations to enable early deployment of disease-modifying treatments before irreversible neurodegenerative damage occurs.