08/27/2026
Why does Alzheimer's hit some brain regions harder than others?
There is scientific debate about how Alzheimer's starts and spreads through the body. Is it mostly driven by a person's genetics making certain regions more fragile, or the disease spreads through the brain's wiring like a chain reaction?
The Raj Lab at University of California, San Francisco used gene expression data from our Human Brain Atlas to test both ideas at once. They found that both are right, but you can only see the genetic signal after you account for the wiring.
The study, published in Brain, could point to new drug targets by revealing that genes previously thought to be irrelevant to Alzheimer's actually have a real, hidden effect on where tau tangles form.
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