Immunohistochemical localization of group I and II metabotropic glutamate receptors in control and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis human spinal cord: upregulation in reactive astrocytes
Section snippets
Subjects
The spinal cords of 25 patients (selected from the Netherlands ALS tissue bank) were studied. Tissue was obtained and used in a manner compliant with the Declaration of Helsinki. Informed consent was obtained for the use of brain tissue. The clinical (derived from patients’ medical records) and neuropathological features are summarized in Table 1. Seventeen patients had a clinical and post-mortem neuropathological diagnosis of ALS (12 sporadic, sALS, and five familial type of ALS, FALS). All
Case material
The clinical and neuropathological characteristics of the subjects used in this study are summarized in Table 1. There were no significant differences between the two groups (ALS and normal controls) with respect to the variables of age, sex, post-mortem interval or storage duration (Mann–Whitney two-tailed U-test). None of the control patients had confounding neurological or neuropathological abnormalities that would be expected to interfere with our analysis of the spinal cord.
mGluR expression in human spinal cord
The patterns of
Discussion
The present study describes the regional and cellular distribution of group I and group II mGluR subtypes in normal and ALS spinal cord. The following observations were made. (1) Immunocytochemical analysis demonstrated expression of mGluR1α, mGluR5 and mGluR2/3 throughout the human spinal cord. mGluR1α showed the highest relative level of expression in ventral horn neurons (laminae VIII and IX), whereas intense mGluR5 immunoreactivity was observed within the dorsal horn (superficial laminae I
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by Telethon Italy Grant 1244 (M.V.C.) and Teding van Berkhout Fellowship of De Christelijke Vereniging voor de Verpleging van Lijders aan Epilepsie (E.A.) and Netherlands ALS Research Foundation (D.T.). We thank W.P. Meun and R. Visser for expert photography.
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The first two authors contributed equally to the present work.