MAPT and tauopathy: However, synaptic disturbances has been observed in early stages of the tauopathy in animal models (Crimins et al., 2012) with the dendritic spines proposed as the locus of early tau-mediated synaptic dysfunction (Hoover et al., 2010) and tau oligomers proposed as the toxic conformational state of the protein (Lasagna-Reeves et al., 2011).