Feng Lixia, Sun Zhaoxia, Han Hui, Zhou Yifeng, Zhang Ming
Department of Anatomy, Anhui Medical University, Hefei, P.R. ChinaDepartment of Ophthalmology, Anhui Medical University, Hefei, P.R. China.
Vis Neurosci. 2007 Nov-Dec;24(6):799-803. doi: 10.1017/S0952523807070721.
The retina mainly contains ganglion, bipolar and photoreceptor cells which are distributed in the ganglion cell layer (GCL), inner nuclear layer (INL) and outer nuclear layer (ONL), respectively. Whether there is an age-related loss of these retinal cells remains not well understood. Cell density and the total number of cells were two commonly used measures to evaluate such age-related changes in most previous studies and provided controversial conclusions. The use of density measures as decisive data is problematic because the total area of the retina was expanded in aging, whereas the application of the total number of cells was limited for assessing ganglion cells. In this study, thus, we wanted to test whether there is an age-related cell loss in the GCL, INL and ONL and if so, whether such a loss is correlated to the convergence ratio of these cells. We used stereological procedures to quantify the total number of cells in the three retinal nuclear layers in six young and six aged Long-Evans rats. We found that during aging, the total volume of the retina remained unchanged, but the retina became thinner. There was no cell loss in each individual nuclear layer, and the ratio of the ONL to INL to GCL was preserved.
视网膜主要包含神经节细胞、双极细胞和光感受器细胞，它们分别分布在神经节细胞层（GCL）、内核层（INL）和外核层（ONL）。目前对于这些视网膜细胞是否存在与年龄相关的损失仍了解不足。在大多数先前的研究中，细胞密度和细胞总数是评估此类与年龄相关变化的两个常用指标，但得出的结论存在争议。将密度测量作为决定性数据存在问题，因为随着年龄增长视网膜的总面积会扩大，而细胞总数的应用在评估神经节细胞时存在局限性。因此，在本研究中，我们想测试在GCL、INL和ONL中是否存在与年龄相关的细胞损失，如果存在，这种损失是否与这些细胞的汇聚率相关。我们采用体视学方法对6只年轻和6只老年Long-Evans大鼠的三个视网膜核层中的细胞总数进行了量化。我们发现，在衰老过程中，视网膜的总体积保持不变，但视网膜变薄。每个单独的核层中均未出现细胞损失，并且ONL与INL与GCL的比例得以保留。
