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Reply to ‘Topographical layer imaging as a tool to track neurodegenerative disease spread in M1’

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 22, page 69 (2021)Cite this article

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We would like to thank Stefanie Schreiber, Alicia Northall, Miriam Weber, Stefan Vielhaber and Esther Kuehn for their interest in our Review (The human motor cortex microcircuit: insights for neurodegenerative disease. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 21, 401–415 (2020))1 and their correspondence (Topographical layer imaging as a tool to track neurodegenerative disease spread in M1. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-020-00404-w (2020))2. Their comment adds an important technical point about the directionality of myelin gradients. They highlight a seminal study that demonstrates the somatosensory cortex 3b and motor cortex 4 are not homogeneous, as suggested by Brodmann3, but can be parcellated into sub-fields with clear boundaries, representing hand and face areas. This is eloquently demonstrated using a functional MRI task to identify hand and face areas and 7T MRI to identify myelin borders between these regions at the individual level4.

This provides a compelling framework, in which the spread of neurodegenerative disease could not only be tracked across cortical layers but also across body topography, enabling a 3D representation5. The authors identify amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) as disease, which can spread body-part-wise initially across the ipsilateral and then the contralateral hemisphere. Indeed, the latter is in keeping with our model showing loss in neurons in the contralateral hemisphere via the death and axonal dying back of ipsilateral intratelencephalic neurons.

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Huntington’s Disease Research Centre, UCL Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, UK

    Peter McColgan, Julie Joubert & Sarah J. Tabrizi

  2. Dementia Research Centre at UCL, University College London, London, UK

    Sarah J. Tabrizi

  3. Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, UCL Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, UK

    Geraint Rees

  4. UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, UK

    Geraint Rees

Authors
  1. Peter McColgan
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  2. Julie Joubert
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  3. Sarah J. Tabrizi
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  4. Geraint Rees
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Correspondence to Peter McColgan.

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McColgan, P., Joubert, J., Tabrizi, S.J. et al. Reply to ‘Topographical layer imaging as a tool to track neurodegenerative disease spread in M1’. Nat Rev Neurosci 22, 69 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-020-00405-9

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