J Alzheimers Dis. 2026 Aug 18:13872877261474020. doi: 10.1177/13872877261474020. Online ahead of print.
ABSTRACT
Anti-amyloid immunotherapies (lecanemab, donanemab) produce statistically significant but clinically modest slowing of decline in early Alzheimer’s disease (AD), with substantial inter-individual response variability that current covariates-antibody titer, baseline amyloid load, apolipoprotein E ε4 (APOE4) status, or tau burden-leave largely unexplained. We propose that a systematically unmeasured upstream variable contributes to this variability: the structural integrity of the locus coeruleus (LC), the principal source of brain norepinephrine (NE), framed as a candidate determinant of amyloid-β (Aβ) clearance efficiency rather than of overall clinical outcome. This hypothesis paper synthesizes three peer-reviewed lines of evidence and derives a hierarchy of falsifiable predictions; no new data are reported. First, tau pathology initiates in LC neurons before any cortical structure, reducing NE output from the earliest preclinical stage. Second, NE governs two complementary Aβ-clearance pathways: glymphatic flow, via aquaporin-4 dynamics driven by slow LC oscillations during non-REM sleep, and microglial phagocytosis, via β2-adrenergic receptor signaling. Third, in Parkinson’s disease, the DTI-ALPS index mediates the relationship between LC integrity on neuromelanin-sensitive MRI and cognition. We term this the Locus Coeruleus Gateway Hypothesis (LCGH). Its mediation chain is testable now in ADNI, which holds research-grade diffusion-tensor imaging; its treatment-response prediction requires immunotherapy cohorts that acquire such imaging, not the existing CLARITY-AD or TRAILBLAZER-ALZ 2 archives, whose safety MRI used diffusion-weighted, not tensor, sequences. We state explicitly that Aβ clearance is only one contributor to clinical benefit, and that the LCGH predicts pharmacodynamic efficiency, not that NE restoration treats AD.
PMID:42611034 | DOI:10.1177/13872877261474020
