Quantitative chemical imaging of amyloid-\beta{} plaques with Raman micro-spectroscopy in human Alzheimer's diseased brains

TL;DR

This study uses Raman micro-spectroscopy to quantitatively analyze chemical constituents in Alzheimer's disease brain tissues, revealing specific lipid and oxidative stress markers associated with amyloid plaques, aiding diagnosis and potential therapeutics.

Contribution

It introduces a quantitative, label-free Raman imaging method combined with non-negative matrix factorization to map chemical changes in AD brains, highlighting new biomarkers.

Findings

Increased lipid and oxidative stress markers in AD tissues

Co-localization of specific lipids and amyloid fibrils in plaques

Chemical markers distinguish AD from control brains

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder and the most common cause of dementia in the elderly. The extracellular accumulation of amyloid-$\beta$ (A$\beta$) in senile plaques is a principal event in the pathogenesis and there is growing evidence that the dysregulation of lipid pathways is implicated in the disease, however the link between these two is still under study. In this work, we investigated human brain samples, from 11 AD patients and a control cohort of age-matched subjects without AD, using label-free chemically-specific Raman micro-spectroscopy. The collected image data were quantitatively analysed using an efficient quantitative unsupervised/partially supervised non-negative matrix factorization method, to retrieve the concentration maps and spectra of the samples' chemical constituents. Significant changes in lipid composition as well as increased concentrations of oxidative stress bio-markers were observed in AD tissues compared to the control. In particular, the analysis revealed accumulations of cholesteryl esters with saturated long-chain fatty acids (FAs), A$\beta$ fibrils, arachidic acid, fibrin, collagen-like amyloidogenic component (CLAC), $\beta$-carotene and magnetite, co-localising in A$\beta$ plaques of AD human brains and exhibiting concentrations highest at the fibrillar core and lowest at the rim. This finding opens perspectives for new anti-inflammatory and antioxidant drug strategies, designed to restore brain homeostasis as potential therapeutics of AD. We also demonstrate by the means of spatial concentration histograms that these identified species separate AD from non-demented control brains, beneficial for AD diagnosis.