Work

Role of cerebellar GABAergic dysfunctions in the origins of essential tremor

Year: 2019

Type: article

Abstract: -receptor subunits in the dentate nucleus, and correspondingly, we studied the evolution of the firing patterns along the loop. The model closely reproduced experimental evidence for each structure in the loop. It showed that an alteration of amplitudes and decay times of the GABAergic currents to the dentate nucleus can facilitate sustained oscillatory activity at tremor frequency throughout the network as well as a robust bursting activity in the thalamus, which is consistent with observations of thalamic tremor cells in ET patients. Tremor-related oscillations initiated in small neural populations and spread to a larger network as the synaptic dysfunction increased, while thalamic high-frequency stimulation suppressed tremor-related activity in thalamus but increased the oscillation frequency in the olivocerebellar loop. These results suggest a mechanism for tremor generation under cerebellar dysfunction, which may explain the origin of ET.

Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1817689116

Authors: Xu Zhang, Sabato Santaniello

Institutions: University of Connecticut, Connecticut Institute for the Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Language: English

Topic: Neurological disorders and treatments

Subfield: Neurology

Field: Medicine

Domain: Health Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: green

Funder: National Science Foundation