Changes in laminar and dendritic organization of the cerebral cortex after traumatic brain injury.

Abstract

Introduction: Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a heterogeneous phenomenon from a molecular, cellular and pathological perspective. Clinical outcome is also extremely variable. It is considered that such a diversity response to TBI is related to the primary injury intensity, associated secondary events (hypoxia, ischemia, oedema and inflammation), metabolic patient state, genetic background, age, gender, etc. After injury the histopathological outcome is variable in time and space. In order to determine the anatomofunctional integrity of nerve cells in the cerebral cortex, it is important to verify the state of the cito and dendroarchitecture and the laminar preservation as a requisite to guarantee connectivity.
Objective: The aim of the present work was to evaluate the response of human cortical neurons using two selective neuronal markers, NeuN and MAP2, which recognize citoarchitecture and dendritic arrangement, respectively.
Materials and methods: In the present study we utilized six tissue samples (4 temporal and 2 frontal cortices) from TBI patients. Tissues from four post-mortem human brains were used as controls. Tissue samples were fixed in PLP, cut at 50 um in a vibratome, incubated with NeuN and MAP2 and processes with the avidin/biotin complex.
Results: NeuN-IR was abnormal in all samples analyzed with some sectors showing slight NeuN-IR, others with NeuN-IR partial loss in supragranular layers, especially layer IIII, and other with a drastic reduction in staining in all cortical layers. MAP2-IR was altered across sections with sectors showing different degrees of changes in the normal pattern of MAP2-IR. Dendritic processes were difficult to follow because of its discontinuity. Layer V apical dendritic processes appear tortuous and its IR was fragmented in some cases they take aberrant orientations.
Conclusions: in order to get new insights about the neuronal outcome after brain injury it is recommended to use MAP2- and NeuN-IR as a complement of classical histopathological methods. The present study shows a diversity of histopathological response in adjacent sectors of a same sample with both markers MAP2 and NeuN, as an indicative of different states of neurodegeneration.