MAPT and Alzheimer disease: In the context of AD, extensively studied pathological hallmarks such as amyloid-beta plaques, tau protein tangles (NFTs), inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, oxidative stress, and excitotoxic cell death instigate an aberrant apoptotic process primarily in vulnerable brain regions like the cerebral cortex and hippocampus (Goel et al. 2022) (Fig. 3).