Neuropatologia de l'Alzheimer i les esquizofrènies

Authors

  • Isidre Ferrer Abizanda
  • Adolf Tobeña Pallarès

Abstract

Neuropathology of Alzheimer and schizophrenia. Neuropathological lesions in Alzheimers disease have been exhaustively described to the point of molecular detail in different and multiple steps, though treatment advances are scarce. In Schizophrenias, on the contrary, neuropathological findings are thin though promising, but treatment options and outcomes are better. This comparison between schizophrenias and Alzheimers disease shows that they derive from different cellular pathologies within the brain. Late dementias, as in Alzheimer patients, result from neurodegeneration due to a multiorganic cellular failure leading to progressive neuronal death in particular brain regions, first, that extends later to the whole organ. Cognitive chaos of schizophrenias have quite a variable course and result from maturation anomalies giving migration, arborization and branching networks which are peculiar in some cortical and subcortical regions. Hence, in Alzheimers disease progressive cellular death due to neural exhaustion dominates, whereas in schizophrenias the main vectors are failures and singularities in synaptic connectivity, with cellular death playing a marginal role. It is not imposssible, howewer, that there might be coincidences, particularly at early stages in both pathologies, at the level of the organization of synaptic spines in distinctive brain regions.

Published

2012-03-01