Chapters authored
Cell Therapy for Parkinson’s Disease: Failure or Success?
Part of the book: Stem Cells in Clinic and Research
Comparison of Normal and Parkinsonian Microcircuit Dynamics in the Rodent Striatum
Part of the book: Mechanisms in Parkinson's Disease
Changes in the Striatal Network Connectivity in Parkinsonian and Dyskinetic Rodent Models
In Parkinson’s disease, there is a loss of dopaminergic innervation in the basal ganglia. The lack of dopamine produces substantial changes in neural plasticity and generates pathological activity patterns between basal ganglia nuclei. The treatment to relieve Parkinsonism is the administration of levodopa. However, the treatment produces dyskinesia. The question to answer is how the interactions between neurons change in the brain microcircuits under these pathological conditions. Calcium imaging is a way to record the activity of dozens of neurons simultaneously with single-cell resolution in brain slices from rodents. We studied these interactions in the striatum, since it is the nucleus of the basal ganglia that receives the major dopaminergic innervation. We used network analysis, where each active neuron is taken as a node and its coactivity with other neurons is taken as its functional connections. The network obtained represents the functional connectome of the striatal microcircuit, which can be characterized with a small set of parameters taken from graph theory. We then quantify the pathological changes at the functional histological scale and the differences between normal and pathological conditions.
Part of the book: Pathophysiology