Transneuronal Propagation of Pathologic α-Synuclein from the Gut to the Brain Models Parkinson's Disease.

By Sangjune Kim, Seung-Hwan Kwon, T. Kam, Nikhil Panicker, H. Ko. Neuron, 2019

1,188 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Analysis of human pathology led Braak to postulate that α-synuclein (α-syn) pathology could spread from the gut to brain via the vagus nerve. Here, we test this postulate by assessing α-synucleinopathy in the brain in a novel gut-to-brain α-syn transmission mouse model, where pathological α-syn preformed fibrils were injected into the duodenal and pyloric muscularis layer. Spread of pathologic α-syn in brain, as assessed by phosphorylation of serine 129 of α-syn, was observed first in the dorsal motor nucleus, then in caudal portions of the hindbrain, including the locus coeruleus, and much later in basolateral amygdala, dorsal raphe nucleus, and the substantia nigra pars compacta. Moreover, loss of dopaminergic neurons and motor and non-motor symptoms were observed in a similar temporal manner. Truncal vagotomy and α-syn deficiency prevented the gut-to-brain spread of α-synucleinopathy and associated neurodegeneration and behavioral deficits. This study supports the Braak hypothesis in the etiology of idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD).

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Neurology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e6d00c72e554a207bcfa65b63f458c35a1cdfc8f

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Citations in the corpus

Brain-first versus body-first Parkinson's disease: a multimodal imaging case-control study. (2020, background): “This proposal is supported by animal evidence showing gut-to-brain spreading of a-synuclein aggregates through autonomic nerves (Kim et al., 2019; Van Den Berge et al., 2019).”