Identifying heritable brain networks that may confer cognitive reserve to Alzheimer's disease

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease that affects 50 million people worldwide (Breijyeh & Karaman, 2020). Among individuals with AD, cognitive dysfunction varies, giving rise to the hypothesis that neural function and anatomical substrates provide “cognitive reserve” against AD. This idea inspired the brain reserve hypothesis, which states that structural features of the brain may protect against AD‐related cognitive decline (Stern, 2012). One potential source of brain reserve is neural microanatomy, which varies across individuals (Wang et al., 2020) and may then explain the differential cognitive outcomes in AD associated with cognitive reserve.