Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- List of abbreviations
- Preface to second edition
- 1 Definition, clinical features and neuroanatomical basis of dementia
- 2 Important anatomical landmarks in the brain in dementia
- 3 Practical approach to pathological diagnosis
- 4 Morphometric methods and dementia
- 5 Safety precautions in laboratories involved with dementia diagnosis and research
- 6 Molecular diagnosis of dementia
- 7 Neuropathology of the ageing brain
- 8 Neuroimaging Alzheimer's disease
- 9 Alzheimer's disease
- 10 Down's syndrome and Alzheimer's disease
- 11 Sporadic tauopathies: Pick's disease, corticobasal degeneration, progressive supranuclear palsy and argyrophilic grain disease
- 12 Hereditary tauopathies and idiopathic frontotemporal dementias
- 13 Vascular dementias
- 14 Familial and sporadic cerebral amyloid angiopathies associated with dementia and the BRI dementias
- 15 Parkinson's disease, dementia with Lewy bodies, multiple system atrophy and the spectrum of diseases with α-synuclein inclusions
- 16 Huntington's disease
- 17 Human prion diseases
- 18 Alcoholism and dementia
- 19 Hydrocephalus and dementia
- 20 Head injury and dementia
- 21 Infectious (and inflammatory) diseases causing dementia
- 22 Schizophrenia and its dementia
- 23 Other diseases that cause dementia
- 24 Transgenic mouse models of neurodegenerative disease
- Appendix: Dementia brain banks
- Index
4 - Morphometric methods and dementia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- List of abbreviations
- Preface to second edition
- 1 Definition, clinical features and neuroanatomical basis of dementia
- 2 Important anatomical landmarks in the brain in dementia
- 3 Practical approach to pathological diagnosis
- 4 Morphometric methods and dementia
- 5 Safety precautions in laboratories involved with dementia diagnosis and research
- 6 Molecular diagnosis of dementia
- 7 Neuropathology of the ageing brain
- 8 Neuroimaging Alzheimer's disease
- 9 Alzheimer's disease
- 10 Down's syndrome and Alzheimer's disease
- 11 Sporadic tauopathies: Pick's disease, corticobasal degeneration, progressive supranuclear palsy and argyrophilic grain disease
- 12 Hereditary tauopathies and idiopathic frontotemporal dementias
- 13 Vascular dementias
- 14 Familial and sporadic cerebral amyloid angiopathies associated with dementia and the BRI dementias
- 15 Parkinson's disease, dementia with Lewy bodies, multiple system atrophy and the spectrum of diseases with α-synuclein inclusions
- 16 Huntington's disease
- 17 Human prion diseases
- 18 Alcoholism and dementia
- 19 Hydrocephalus and dementia
- 20 Head injury and dementia
- 21 Infectious (and inflammatory) diseases causing dementia
- 22 Schizophrenia and its dementia
- 23 Other diseases that cause dementia
- 24 Transgenic mouse models of neurodegenerative disease
- Appendix: Dementia brain banks
- Index
Summary
Introduction
Classical neuropathology implements gross and microscopic methods to determine diagnosis and neuroanatomical localization of pathology. Diagnostic standards for dementing illnesses have been refined as semi-quantitative grading systems for dementia pathology, allowing rough clinical-pathological correlations. These staging systems include the Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer's Disease (CERAD) and the Braak and Braak criteria for Alzheimer's disease (AD), and consensus neuropathological criteria for dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) (Braak & Braak, 1991; Mirra et al., 1991; McKeith et al., 1996). For more detailed quantitative analysis of the neuropathology of dementia, sensitive morphometric methods have been developed. The dominant method in recent years is stereology, which applies a series of rules to overcome biases in counting objects (e.g. neurons) on a slide (Sterio, 1984; Gundersen et al., 1988a,b). Stereological approaches to the assessment of anatomical volumes, neurite length, synapse counts, neuron counts and neuron size have utilized such varied resources as gross brains, MRI scans, light microscopy, confocal microscopy, and electron microscopy (Geinisman et al., 1996; Everall et al., 1999; Peterson, 1999; Roberts et al., 2000). This chapter reviews principles of stereology as applied to anatomical volume measurements and neuron counting at the light microscope level, with a particular emphasis on AD. Other aspects of stereology, such as using the rotator or nucleator for particle volume and cycloid intercepts for surface area, can be found in recent reviews and texts (Gundersen et al., 1988a; Howard & Reed, 1998).
Profile-counting methods
Since it is inefficient to count all the neurons in a particular brain region, methods have been developed to estimate neuron number from a sampling of microscopic fields.
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- Information
- The Neuropathology of Dementia , pp. 75 - 81Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004