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Neuropathological characterisation of French bovine spongiform encephalopathy cases

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Abstract

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle is a neurodegenerative disease belonging to the transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, a group of diseases including sheep scrapie and human Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The pathological characteristics of BSE are vacuolation, mild gliosis, little neuronal degeneration without inflammatory process and abnormal prion protein (PrPsc) accumulation. The aim of this study was to define precisely the neuropathology of BSE in French cases by assessing the distributions of vacuolar lesions and PrPsc within cattle brains. We showed that vacuolation and PrPsc accumulation varied from one structure to the other, and most often coexisted. These distributions were in accordance with British and Portuguese data previously published. Seven types of PrPsc immunolabelling were described based on morphology and localisation. Besides mild gliosis mainly associated with vacuolation, we observed a very slight neuronal apoptosis. In addition, we saw a moderate vimentin labelling colocalised with vacuolation, a discrete ubiquitin staining and no Tau protein staining. This study provides precise histopathological data that will be completed with a quantitative study on more than 100 obex samples of French BSE cases.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. Grassi (CEA-Saclay, France) for his courtesy in supplying anti-PrP antibody and S. Dechavanne (AFSSA-Lyon) for his excellent technical assistance in apoptosis investigation in cattle. This work was financially supported by grants from the European FAIR PL98–7021 and the French Ministry of Agriculture and Fishery. Sabine Debeer was financially supported by the European FAIR 98-7021.

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  1. Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherches en Pathologie Bovine et Hygiène des Viandes, Unité Virologie-ATNC, AFSSA Lyon, 31 avenue Tony Garnier, 69364, Lyon cedex 07, France

    Sabine Debeer, Thierry Baron & Anna Bencsik

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  1. Sabine Debeer
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  2. Thierry Baron
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  3. Anna Bencsik
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Correspondence to Anna Bencsik.

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Debeer, S., Baron, T. & Bencsik, A. Neuropathological characterisation of French bovine spongiform encephalopathy cases. Histochem Cell Biol 120, 513–521 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00418-003-0593-5

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