The University of Edinburgh Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences, UK Dementia Research Institute, Edinburgh, UK.
MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA, USA.
Nat Rev Neurosci. 2019 Feb;20(2):94-108. doi: 10.1038/s41583-018-0113-1.
The symptoms of Alzheimer disease reflect a loss of neural circuit integrity in the brain, but neurons do not work in isolation. Emerging evidence suggests that the intricate balance of interactions between neurons, astrocytes, microglia and vascular cells required for healthy brain function becomes perturbed during the disease, with early changes likely protecting neural circuits from damage, followed later by harmful effects when the balance cannot be restored. Moving beyond a neuronal focus to understand the complex cellular interactions in Alzheimer disease and how these change throughout the course of the disease may provide important insight into developing effective therapeutics.
阿尔茨海默病的症状反映了大脑中神经回路完整性的丧失，但神经元不是孤立工作的。新出现的证据表明，健康大脑功能所需的神经元、星形胶质细胞、小胶质细胞和血管细胞之间复杂的相互作用平衡在疾病发生时会受到干扰，早期的变化可能会保护神经回路免受损伤，而随后当平衡无法恢复时，就会产生有害影响。超越神经元的关注，了解阿尔茨海默病中复杂的细胞相互作用以及这些相互作用在疾病过程中的变化，可能为开发有效的治疗方法提供重要的见解。
