Granulovacuolar degeneration in the ageing brain and in dementia

Quantitative morphometry with a sampling stage light microscope was performed to determine the severity of granulovacuolar degeneration of hippocampal neurones in serially sectioned temporal lobe from mentally normal subjects of different ages and from demented patients. The degree of granulovacuolar change in control brains increased slightly with increasing age; the "granulovacuolar index" of cases with Alzheimer's disease exceeded by many times that of age-matched controls. This significant difference was demonstrable whether the granulovacuolar severity was expressed as number of affected cells per volume of cortex analysed, or as the percentage involvement of total neurones counted in the hippocampus. The posterior half of each dement's hippocampus was found to be more susceptible to this augmented granulovacuolar degeneration than the anterior half, a selectivity already observed for neurofibrillary tangel formation in the same material.