Intracellular accumulation of amyloid-ß is a marker of selective neuronal vulnerability in Alzheimer’s disease

Defining how amyloid-β and pTau together lead to neurodegeneration is fundamental to understanding Alzheimer’s disease (AD). We used imaging mass cytometry to identify neocortical neuronal subtypes lost with AD in post-mortem brain middle temporal gyri from non-diseased and AD donors. Here we showed that L5,6 RORB+FOXP2+ and L3,5,6 GAD1+FOXP2+ neurons, which accumulate amyloid-β intracellularly from early Braak stages, are selectively vulnerable to degeneration in AD, while L3 RORB+GPC5+ neurons, which accumulate pTau but not amyloid-β, are not lost even at late Braak stages. We discovered spatial associations between activated microglia and these vulnerable neurons and found that vulnerable RORB+FOXP2+ neuronal transcriptomes are enriched selectively for pathways involved in inflammation and glycosylation and, with progression to AD, also protein degradation. Our results suggest that the accumulation of intraneuronal amyloid-β, which is associated with glial inflammatory pathology, may contribute to the initiation of degeneration of these vulnerable neurons.