MAPT and Alzheimer disease: Given the emphasis on “relative sparing”, the goal of our current study was to investigate whether AD patients can have NFT in the association cortex while completely sparing the hippocampus, and to assess three possible neuropathologic pathways based on initiation and end sites of tau pathology (Fig. 2a): (i) NFT accumulation follows the stereotypical order defined by Braak and Braak [10], where NFT in the hippocampus always precede NFT in the association cortex.