Mitigating secondary delayed neuronal injury has been a therapeutic strategy for minimizing neurological symptoms after several types of brain injury. Interestingly, secondary neuronal loss appeared to be closely related to functional loss and/or death of astrocytes. In the brain damage induced by agonists of two glutamate receptors, N-ethyl-D-aspartic acid (NMDA) and kainic acid (KA), NMDA ind...

Reactive astrogliosis is characterized by a profound change in astrocyte phenotype in response to all CNS injuries and diseases. To better understand the reactive astrocyte state, we used Affymetrix GeneChip arrays to profile gene expression in populations of reactive astrocytes isolated at various time points after induction using two mouse injury models, ischemic stroke and neuroinflammation....

Three siblings who suffered from progressive mental retardation, seizures, and rigidity showed degeneration of the cerebral cortex. This was manifested by severe to complete neuronal loss with astrogliosis and microgliosis. In one child a brain biopsy was performed at the age of 3 months. The only lesion found was large disorganized perinuclear mitochondria in the neurones. The possibility that...

A reactive astrogliosis is a prominent feature of the response to injury in the central nervous system (CNS), and studies in both man and animals have provided a well-defined sequence of morphologic changes that accompany these events. However, the contribution of a reactive astrogliois to disease pathogenesis has until recently, remained poorly understood. Now, with the development of transgen...

Brain aging is associated with diminished circadian clock output and decreased expression of the core clock proteins, which regulate many aspects of cellular biochemistry and metabolism. The genes encoding clock proteins are expressed throughout the brain, though it is unknown whether these proteins modulate brain homeostasis. We observed that deletion of circadian clock transcriptional activat...

Prostaglandin (PG) D2 is well known as a mediator of inflammation. Hematopoietic PGD synthase (HPGDS) is responsible for the production of PGD2 involved in inflammatory responses. Microglial activation and astrogliosis are commonly observed during neuroinflammation, including that which occurs during demyelination. Using the genetic demyelination mouse twitcher, a model of human Krabbe's diseas...

OBJECTIVES Melatonin is known as an anti-inflammatory agent, and it has been proven to exert neuroprotection through inhibition of cell death (apoptosis) in several models of brain injury. Secondary injury following the primary traumatic brain injury (TBI) results in glial cells activation, especially astrocytes. In fact, astrocyte activation causes the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines ...

Activation of spinal cord microglia and astrocytes is a common phenomenon in nerve injury pain models and is thought to exacerbate pain perception. Following a nerve injury, a transient increase in the presence of microglia takes place while the increased numbers of astrocytes stay elevated for an extended period of time. It has been proposed that activated microglia are crucial for the develop...

We demonstrate the significance of peripheral benzodiazepine receptor (PBR) imaging in living mouse models of Alzheimer's disease (AD) as biomarkers and functional signatures of glial activation. By radiochemically and immunohistochemically analyzing murine models of the two pathological hallmarks of AD, we found that AD-like Abeta deposition is concurrent with astrocyte-dominant PBR expression...

Rasmussen encephalitis (RE) is a rare neurologic disorder of childhood characterized by unihemispheric inflammation, progressive neurologic deficits, and intractable focal epilepsy. The pathogenesis of RE is still enigmatic. Adenosine is a key endogenous signaling molecule with anticonvulsive and anti-inflammatory effects, and our previous work demonstrated that dysfunction of the adenosine kin...