Hippocampal CA2 Lewy pathology is associated with cholinergic degeneration in Parkinson’s disease with cognitive decline
File(s)Liu_Hippocampal CA2 Lewy_BMC.pdf (6.35 MB)
Published version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Although the precise neuropathological substrates of cognitive decline in Parkinson’s disease (PD) remain elusive, it has long been regarded that pathology in the CA2 hippocampal subfield is characteristic of Lewy body dementias, including dementia in PD (PDD). Early non-human primate tracer studies demonstrated connections from the nucleus of the vertical limb of the diagonal band of Broca (nvlDBB, Ch2) to the hippocampus. However, the relationship between Lewy pathology of the CA2 subfield and cholinergic fibres has not been explored. Therefore, in this study, we investigated the burden of pathology in the CA2 subsector of PD cases with varying degrees of cognitive impairment and correlated this with the extent of septohippocampal cholinergic deficit. Hippocampal sections from 67 PD, 34 PD with mild cognitive impairment and 96 PDD cases were immunostained for tau and alpha-synuclein, and the respective pathology burden was assessed semi-quantitatively. In a subset of cases, the degree of CA2 cholinergic depletion was quantified using confocal microscopy and correlated with cholinergic neuronal loss in Ch2. We found that only cases with dementia have a significantly greater Lewy pathology, whereas cholinergic fibre depletion was evident in cases with mild cognitive impairment and this was significantly correlated with loss of cholinergic neurons in Ch2. In addition, multiple antigen immunofluorescence demonstrated colocalisation between cholinergic fibres and alpha-synuclein but not tau pathology. Such specific Lewy pathology targeting the cholinergic system within the CA2 subfield may contribute to the unique memory retrieval deficit seen in patients with Lewy body disorders, as distinct from the memory storage deficit seen in Alzheimer’s disease.
Date Issued
2019-04-25
Date Acceptance
2019-04-10
Citation
Acta Neuropathologica Communications, 2019, 7
ISSN
2051-5960
Publisher
BioMed Central
Journal / Book Title
Acta Neuropathologica Communications
Volume
7
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s). 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, andreproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link tothe Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver(http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
Subjects
Science & Technology
Life Sciences & Biomedicine
Neurosciences
Neurosciences & Neurology
Parkinson's disease
Alzheimer's disease
Cholinergic system
Diagonal band of Broca
CA2
Hippocampus
ALZHEIMERS-DISEASE
ALPHA-SYNUCLEIN
TYROSINE-HYDROXYLASE
DIAGNOSTIC-CRITERIA
MEMORY IMPAIRMENT
DIAGONAL BAND
AREA CA2
DEMENTIA
BODIES
IMMUNOREACTIVITY
Alzheimer’s disease
CA2
Cholinergic system
Diagonal band of Broca
Hippocampus
Parkinson’s disease
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
ARTN 61