Summary.
In Alzheimer's disease (AD), senile plaques containing amyloid-β (Aβ) are associated with neurodegeneration, yet little quantitative data are available concerning the spatiotemporal patterns of neuronal death that result from exposure to Aβ deposits. Furthermore, plaques are accompanied by ferritin-rich cells but no data exist regarding the spatiotemporal expression of ferritin in response to Aβ. The present study has obtained such data after injecting aged Aβ peptide into the parietal cortex of adult rats. Injected deposits of fibrillar Aβ (1 μl of 1 mM in saline) were cleared within 7 days but did not cause a significant increase in ferritin expression. Counts of dying neurones showed that human Aβ1–40 killed as many neurones as control injections of saline, while human Aβ1–42 and rat Aβ1–40 killed significantly less. We conclude that the fibrillar Aβ in plaques is not likely to be directly responsible for the neurodegeneration and ferritin expression that occurs in AD.
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Received August 1, 2002; accepted October 10, 2002 Published online December 20, 2002
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ID="*" Current address: Institute of Pathology, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH 44106, U.S.A.
Acknowledgements A small portion of the experiments described in this study were performed at the Vision, Touch and Hearing Research Centre at The University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Australia, and some were also performed at the School of Anatomy at The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. The tissue used in this study was generously provided by Dr T. Tannenberg from the Brisbane Brain Bank and Drs J. Kril and G. Halliday from the Sydney Brain Bank. We wish to thank Prof. K. Ng for advice on statistical analysis and comments on the manuscript. This work was funded in part by an NHMRC Project Grant awarded to SRR and by the generous support of the Department of Psychology, Monash University.
Authors' address: Dr. G. Bishop, Institute of Pathology, Case Western Reserve University, 2085 Adelbert Road, Cleveland, OH 44106, USA, e-mail: gmb10@po.cwru.edu
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Bishop, G., Robinson, S. Deposits of fibrillar Aβ do not cause neuronal loss or ferritin expression in adult rat brain. J Neural Transm 110, 381–400 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00702-002-0796-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00702-002-0796-2