MAPT and Alzheimer disease: To test the potential of our ASC speck blood assay for improving discrimination between AD samples and controls, we combined measurement of ASC specks with measurements of total Aβ aggregates, and phosphorylated tau aggregates in the same set of serum samples from 20 early AD, 20 AD with moderate dementia patients and 30 controls using our established SiMPull assay with a pair of identical 6E10 antibodies for capture and detection of Aβ aggregates and the AT8 antibody pair for phosphorylated tau (p-tau) at positions 202/205 (p-tau-AT8) (Fig. 3A–D).