Post mortem studies of AD patients will be needed to confirm the biophysical source of spinal cord atrophy; although at first one could imagine that any change in CSA and CSV could be the result of retrograde Wallerian degeneration from the cerebral cortex (Alves et al., 2015), initial spinal cord post-mortem investigations of AD and HC has suggested that phosphorylates tau tangles are present especially in the cervical segment of the spinal cord of AD, even at the early stage (Dugger et al., 2013). The gene discussed is MAPT; the disease is Alzheimer disease.