When repeating the analyses stratified by diagnostic group, we found more significant associations between tau-PET and network measures with increasing disease severity: In preclinical AD, higher tau-PET values in the meta-ROI were associated with lower clustering values (β±SE; − 0.58±0.26), path length (− 1.04±0.24), and λ values (− 1.15±0.47; all p < .05; Fig. 1; Table 3). Here, MAPT is linked to Alzheimer disease.