Asymmetric Changes in Limbic Cortex and Planum Temporale in Patients with Alzheimer Disease.

Background: There are several cortical areas related to the limbic system that form the output from the hippocampal formation whose cellular and morphological features are important for the onset and progression of AD. We hypothesized that there would be a significant difference in the size of cortical pyramidal neurons and that there would also be a hemispheric asymmetry between Alzheimer disease patients and controls. These differences would potentially be accompanied by an increase in the numbers of Fluoro-Jade B-positive degenerating cortical neurons and a corresponding decrease in the numbers of DAPI-stained cortical neuronal nuclei in subjects with AD compared to controls.

Difference in Subjective Accessibility of On Demand Recall of Visual, Taste, and Olfactory Memories.

We present here significant difference in the evocation capability between sensory memories (visual, taste, and olfactory) throughout certain categories of the population. As object for this memory recall we selected French fries that are simple and generally known. From daily life we may intuitively feel that there is much better recall of the visual and auditory memory compared to the taste and olfactory ones.

Effect of stress on structural brain asymmetry.

There is a growing body of evidence that stressful events may affect the brain not only as a whole, but also in multiple laterality aspects. The present review is aimed at discussing the effect of stress and stress hormones on structural brain asymmetry. Differences and crossroads of functional and structural asymmetry are briefly mentioned throughout the document.

Hippocampal spatial position evaluation on MRI for research and clinical practice.

In clinical practice as well as in many volumetric studies we use different reorientations of the brain position towards x and y axis on the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. In order to find out whether it has an overall effect on the resulting 2D data, manual hippocampal area measurements and rotation variability of the brain (in two reoriented axes) and the skull were performed in 23 Alzheimer's disease patients and 31 healthy controls. After the MRI scanning, native brain scans (nat) were reoriented into the two different artificial planes (anterior commissure-posterior commissure axis (AC-PC) and hippocampal horizontal long axis (hipp)).

Simple method for evaluation of planum temporale pyramidal neurons shrinkage in postmortem tissue of Alzheimer disease patients.

We measured the length of the pyramidal neurons in the cortical layer III in four subregions of the planum temporale (transitions into superior temporal gyrus, Heschl's gyrus, insular cortex, and Sylvian fissure) in control group and Alzheimer disease patients. Our hypothesis was that overall length of the pyramidal neurons would be smaller in the Alzheimer disease group compared to controls and also there would be right-left asymmetry in both the control and Alzheimer disease groups. We found pyramidal neuron length asymmetry only in controls--in the transition into the Sylvian fissure--and the rest of the subregions in the control group and Alzheimer disease patients did not show size difference.