BSE, Scrapie, and vCJD: Infectious Neurodegenerative Diseases

Measurement of brain microglial proliferation rates in vivo in response to neuroinflammatory stimuli: Application to drug discovery

“…Microglial activation may cause neuronal damage by production of neuroinflammatory mediators (e.g., pro‐inflammatory cytokines, nitric oxide, reactive oxygen species) or by autoimmune mechanisms (e.g., presentation of self and foreign antigens to T cells) (Jack et al, 2005; Kim and Joh, 2006). Microglia have been implicated in the progression or adverse outcomes of several neurological diseases, including Alzheimer's disease (McGeer and McGeer, 2002b), multiple sclerosis (Neumann, 2003), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (McGeer and McGeer, 2002a), Parkinson's disease (Wullner and Klockgether, 2003), stroke (Danton and Dietrich, 2003), and variant Creutzfeldt‐Jacob disease (Riemer et al, 2002). Accordingly, microglia represent a therapeutic target (Aldskogius, 2001; Liu and Hong, 2003; van Rossum and Hanisch, 2004) for the treatment of chronic neuroinflammatory and neurodegenerative disorders.…”