Journal ArticleDOI
Life and Death of Neurons in the Aging Brain
John H. Morrison,Patrick R. Hof +1 more
TLDR
The qualitative and quantitative differences between aging and Alzheimer's disease with respect to neuron loss are discussed, and age-related changes in functional and biochemical attributes of hippocampal circuits that might mediate functional decline in the absence of neuron death are explored.Abstract:
Neurodegenerative disorders are characterized by extensive neuron death that leads to functional decline, but the neurobiological correlates of functional decline in normal aging are less well defined. For decades, it has been a commonly held notion that widespread neuron death in the neocortex and hippocampus is an inevitable concomitant of brain aging, but recent quantitative studies suggest that neuron death is restricted in normal aging and unlikely to account for age-related impairment of neocortical and hippocampal functions. In this article, the qualitative and quantitative differences between aging and Alzheimer's disease with respect to neuron loss are discussed, and age-related changes in functional and biochemical attributes of hippocampal circuits that might mediate functional decline in the absence of neuron death are explored. When these data are viewed comprehensively, it appears that the primary neurobiological substrates for functional impairment in aging differ in important ways from those in neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Senescence in aging and disorders of the central nervous system
TL;DR: The resident cells of the central nervous system are described, how they exhibit tendencies toward senescence with age and disease, and tools that will be useful to aid in senescent cell identification and characterization in this tissue are discussed.
Journal ArticleDOI
Caffeine facilitation of glutamate release from rat cerebral cortex nerve terminals (synaptosomes) through activation protein kinase C pathway: an interaction with presynaptic adenosine A1 receptors.
TL;DR: It is concluded that caffeine exerts their presynaptic facilitatory effect, likely through the activation of PKC pathway, which subsequently enhances terminal excitability and Ca2+ entry to cause an increase in evoked glutamate release from rat cerebrocortical nerve terminals.
Journal ArticleDOI
Morphological alterations in the occipital cortex of aged rats with impaired memory: A Golgi–Cox study
TL;DR: It is suggested that structural alterations affecting pyramidal neurons in the occipital cortex of aged rats may contribute to spatial memory impairment, and in a subpopulation of well-performing aged rats, these structural alterations were less marked than in the population of bad performers.
Journal ArticleDOI
Changes in cortical circuits during aging
John H. Morrison,Patrick R. Hof +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the key pathologic events in human hippocampus and neocortex that underlie Alzheimer's disease, and contrast these events with those of normal aging in these same brain regions of animal models.
References
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TL;DR: The Neuropathology Task Force of the Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer's Disease (CERAD) has developed a practical and standardized neuropathology protocol for the postmortem assessment of dementia and control subjects, which provides neuropathologic definitions of such terms as “definite Alzheimer's disease” (AD), “probable AD,” “possible AD” and “normal brain” to indicate levels of diagnostic certainty.