Elsevier

Neuroscience Letters

Volume 453, Issue 2, 3 April 2009, Pages 77-80
Neuroscience Letters

Regional differences in the severity of Lewy body pathology across the olfactory cortex

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2009.02.006Get rights and content

Abstract

We studied α-synuclein pathology in the rhinencephalon of ten cases of Parkinson's disease (PD) and twelve neurologically normal controls, of which seven had incidental Lewy bodies in the substantia nigra at autopsy and five had no pathological evidence of neurological disease. In all PD and incidental Lewy bodies cases, α-synuclein pathology was found in all five subregions of the primary olfactory cortex that were sampled, and amongst them the pathology was significantly more severe in the temporal division of the piriform cortex than in the frontal division of the piriform cortex, olfactory tubercle or anterior portions of the entorhinal cortex. The orbitofrontal cortex, which is an area of projection from the primary olfactory cortex, was affected in some cases but overall the α-synuclein pathology was less severe in this area than in the primary olfactory cortex. Because different areas of the rhinencephalon are likely to play different roles in olfaction and our data indicate a differential involvement by α-synuclein deposition of structures implicated in smell, future prospective studies investigating the pathophysiological basis of hyposmia in PD should consider to examine the areas of primary olfactory cortex separately.

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Acknowledgements

The Reta Lila Weston Trust for Medical Research and the Queen Square Brain Bank for Neurological Disorders funded this research. We would like to thank Dr. Laura Parkkinen and Dr. Christine Hall for helpful comments about the manuscript and Mr. Bhav Mehta for helping with designing the figures.

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