Mapping Purkinje Cell Placement Along the Purkinje Cell Layer: an Analysis of Postmortem Tissue from Essential Tremor Patients vs. Controls

Postmortem studies have reported Purkinje cell loss in essential tremor (ET), and we recently demonstrated a significant increase in the mean distance between Purkinje cell bodies (i.e., a larger gap length distance) in ET cases vs. controls, likely reflecting a disease-associated reduction in Purki...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cerebellum (London, England) England), 2016-12, Vol.15 (6), p.726-731
Main Authors: Louis, Elan D., Rabinowitz, Daniel, Choe, Matthew, Tate, William J., Kelly, Geoffrey C., Kuo, Sheng-Han, Faust, Phyllis L.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aged, 80 and over
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Biomedicine
Cell Count
Essential Tremor - pathology
Female
Fixatives
Formaldehyde
Humans
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
Male
Microscopy
Neurobiology
Neurology
Neurosciences
Original Paper
Purkinje Cells - cytology
Purkinje Cells - pathology
Software
Tissue Fixation
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Summary:Postmortem studies have reported Purkinje cell loss in essential tremor (ET), and we recently demonstrated a significant increase in the mean distance between Purkinje cell bodies (i.e., a larger gap length distance) in ET cases vs. controls, likely reflecting a disease-associated reduction in Purkinje cells. We now analyze the regularity of distribution of Purkinje cells along the Purkinje cell layer to determine whether there is greater disorganization in ET cases than in age-matched controls. A standard parasagittal, formalin-fixed, tissue block was harvested from the neocerebellum of 50 ET cases and 25 age-matched controls. The gap length distance (μm) between Purkinje cells was quantified using a nearest neighbor analysis in which the distance between each Purkinje cell body was measured in OpenLAB software, version 5 (Improvision, Waltham, MA) by drawing a freehand line between adjacent Purkinje cell bodies along the entirety of the Purkinje cell layer within a given image. We analyzed the subject-specific variation in the organization of Purkinje cells along the Purkinje cell layer. The 50 ET cases and 25 controls were similar in age at death, gender, and brain weight. Overall, greater variation in gap length distance (i.e., more disorganization) was associated with greater gap length distance ( p  
ISSN:1473-4222
1473-4230
DOI:10.1007/s12311-015-0742-0