Neurosciences Program, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92037, USA.
J Comp Neurol. 2010 Apr 15;518(8):1176-98. doi: 10.1002/cne.22264.
The amygdaloid complex (AC), a key component of the limbic system, is a brain region critical for the detection and interpretation of emotionally salient information. Therefore, changes in its structure and function are likely to provide correlates of mood and emotion disorders, diseases that afflict a large portion of the human population. Previous gross comparisons of the AC in control and diseased individuals have, however, mainly failed to discover these expected correlations with diseases. We have characterized AC nuclei in different nonhuman primate species to establish a baseline for more refined comparisons between the normal and the diseased amygdala. AC nuclei volume and neuron number in 19 subdivisions are reported from 13 Old and New World primate brains, spanning five primate species, and compared with corresponding data from humans. Analysis of the four largest AC nuclei revealed that volume and neuron number of one component, the central nucleus, has a negative allometric relationship with total amygdala volume and neuron number, which is in contrast with the isometric relationship found in the other AC nuclei (for both neuron number and volume). Neuron density decreases across all four nuclei according to a single power law with an exponent of about minus one-half. Because we have included quantitative comparisons with great apes and humans, our conclusions apply to human brains, and our scaling laws can potentially be used to study the anatomical correlates of the amygdala in disorders involving pathological emotion processing.
杏仁核复合体（AC）是边缘系统的关键组成部分，是大脑中一个关键区域，对于检测和解释情感相关信息至关重要。因此，其结构和功能的变化可能提供了情绪和情感障碍的相关指标，这些疾病影响了很大一部分人类人口。然而，之前对对照组和疾病患者的杏仁核复合体的大体比较主要未能发现与疾病相关的这些预期相关性。我们对不同的非人类灵长类动物的杏仁核复合体进行了特征描述，为正常和患病的杏仁核之间更精细的比较建立了基线。我们从 13 个旧大陆和新大陆灵长类动物的大脑中报告了 19 个细分部分的杏仁核复合体核体积和神经元数量，并与人类的相应数据进行了比较。对四个最大的杏仁核复合体核的分析表明，一个组成部分中央核的体积和神经元数量与总杏仁核复合体体积和神经元数量呈负异速关系，这与其他杏仁核复合体核（神经元数量和体积）中发现的等速关系形成对比。所有四个核的神经元密度都根据单一幂律递减，指数约为负二分之一。由于我们进行了与大猿和人类的定量比较，我们的结论适用于人类大脑，并且我们的标度定律可以潜在地用于研究涉及病理性情绪处理的疾病中杏仁核的解剖学相关性。
