Unsuspected early neuronal loss in scrapie-infected mice revealed by morphometric analysis

This study was undertaken to determine to what extent neuronal loss is a feature of scrapie pathology, using an experimental model in which infectivity and subsequent vacuolar lesions are well characterized but in which neuronal loss has not been previously identified. Intraocular infection with ME7 scrapie directs infection through the major projections of the optic nerve, which include the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus (dLGN) on the contralateral side to the infected eye. Infectivity can be detected in the dLGN at 77 days post-infection and vacuolar lesions are first seen around halfway through the incubation period of 240 days. Morphometric assessment of neuron number in the dLGN was made on gallocyanin stained semi-serial sections from 5 infected and 5 normal brain-injected controls at 4 fifty-day intervals during the incubation period, and on clinically terminal mice. The number of neurons in the dLGN of the infected mice decreased steadily from around 20,000 at 50 days post-infection to under 2,000 in the terminal group. The loss was delayed in the ipsilateral dLGN, although terminal counts were the same for both sides. The onset of neuronal loss was coincident with initial vacuolar changes, and neuronal numbers were inversely proportional to the severity of vacuolation. It is concluded that scrapie infection causes a progressive neuronal loss that can be identified some 30-80 days after infectivity can be detected in the dLGN, long before the onset of clinical disease.