Summary

In the brains of people with Alzheimer's and certain other types of dementia, two proteins called amyloid-beta and tau start misbehaving in different ways – though it's not clear if these abnormalities are drivers of the disease, or consequences of it. With tau, the protein begins to misfold into the wrong shape, and collects together in threads called fibrils inside brain cells, eventually killing those cells off. A long-standing question has been how this misfolding spreads through the brain.

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