schizophrenia (scz) is a common severe highly heritable psychiatric disorder affecting the youth in puberty and is manifested by impairments in cognition and emotion along with negative (ie, avolition, alogia, apathy, poor social functioning) and positive (presence of hallucinations, delusions) symptoms. the aim of this paper is to provide evidence for the neurodegenerative model of scz and its...

Aquaporins (AQPs) are a family of widely distributed membrane-inserted water channel proteins providing a pathway for osmotically-driven water, glycerol, urea or ions transport through cell membranes and mechanisms to control particular aspects of homeostasis. Beside their physiological expression patterns in Central Nervous System (CNS), it is conceivable that AQPs are also abnormally expresse...

Protein glycosylation regulates protein function and cellular distribution. Additionally, aberrant protein glycosylations have been recognized to play major roles in human disorders, including neurodegenerative diseases. Glycoproteomics, a branch of proteomics that catalogs and quantifies glycoproteins, provides a powerful means to systematically profile the glycopeptides or glycoproteins of a ...

The decline in mental fitness associated with Alzheimer disease is accompanied by physical changes in the brain, including the development of characteristic plaques and neurofibrillary tangles, but the pathogenesis of those changes is not clear. Recent work suggests that the activation of microglia in response to injury, illness, aging, or other causes begins a cascade of events that can best b...

Synapse is the basic structural and functional component for neural communication in the brain. The presynaptic terminal is the structural and functionally essential area that initiates communication and maintains the continuous functional neural information flow. It contains synaptic vesicles (SV) filled with neurotransmitters, an active zone for release, and numerous proteins for SV fusion an...

Astrocytes contribute to the maintenance of the health and function of the central nervous system (CNS). Thus, it is not surprising that these multifunctional cells have been implicated in the onset and progression of several neurodegenerative diseases. The involvement of astrocytes in the neuropathology of these diseases is likely a consequence of both the loss of normal homeostatic functions ...

To the Editor: Guerreiro et al.1 and Jonsson et al.2 (Jan. 10 issue) report an association between the single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs75932628 in the gene encoding the triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells 2 (TREM2) (predicting an R47H substitution) and Alzheimer’s disease in persons of European ancestry. We and other members of the Alzheimer’s Disease Genetics Consortium assem...

1Life, Health and Environmental Science Department, University of L’Aquila, 67100 L’Aquila, Italy 2Neuropsychology Unit, IRCCS Santa Lucia Foundation, 00179 Rome, Italy 3School of Life & Health Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham, West Midlands B15, UK 4Division of Behavioral Neurology, Department of Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, National Cheng Kung University Hospital, ...

BACKGROUND Neurodegenerative dementias are typically characterized by an insidious onset and a relatively slowly progressive course. Less common are patients with a rapidly progressive course to death. OBJECTIVE To characterize patients with a neurodegenerative disease and a rapidly progressive course to death. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PATIENTS Using a text word search for "rapid" and "dementia...