Science Spotlight: CSF biomarker discriminates between FTLD pathologies

Scientists from Amsterdam University Medical Center discovered a cerebrospinal fluid biomarker of disease progression that can discriminate TDP-43-driven frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) from tau-driven FTLD. The biomarker could help advance clinical trials targeting specific FTLD pathologies.

The Nature Medicine article authors developed an immunoassay to quantify acetylated tau at lysine 174 (AcTau174) in cerebrospinal fluid and show it is elevated across dementias but most prominently in FTLD-TDP, where it separated FTLD-TDP from FTLD-tau with diagnostic accuracies in the range of 0.8–0.83 in a discovery cohort and 0.75–0.79 in independent series...