Enlarged choroid plexus epithelial cells in elderly neurodegenerative brains were linked to stronger mitochondrial staining.
Evidence
This immunohistochemical image-analysis study measured cell area and Tom20-positive pixel proportion in 13,090 epithelial cells from 20 neurodegenerative-disease and control brain cases.
Caveat
The correlation does not show whether increased mitochondrial content causes, compensates for, or merely accompanies epithelial enlargement.
Simplified
The choroid plexus (CP) contributes to cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) production and regulation of circadian rhythm. Recently, many neuroimaging studies have reported enlarged CP volumes in patients with neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's disease (AD). While previous morphometric analysis revealed age-related enlargement of CP epithelial cells, the metabolic significance of such morphological changes including eosinophilic enlarged changes remains unclear. In this study, we investigated mitochondrial alterations in CP epithelial cells using immunohistochemistry for , a marker of the mitochondrial outer membrane. Temporal lobes, including CP, in patients with AD, vascular dementia, Parkinson's disease, and multiple system atrophy, and neuropathologically unremarkable controls were examined. Quantitative image analysis was performed using AI-assisted segmentation (cellpose) and Python-based processing (OpenCV, NumPy, and Pandas). Cell area and the proportion of Tom20-positive pixels (brown ratio) were measured in 13 090 epithelial cells from 20 cases, and data were analyzed using Spearman's rank correlation. The brown ratio was positively correlated with cell area. Enlarged epithelial cells frequently exhibited strong Tom20 immunoreactivity. These findings suggest that cellular enlargement in the CP epithelium is accompanied by increased mitochondrial content, highlighting a potential metabolic response in neurodegenerative brains.
Key numbers
0.421
Cell Area Correlation
between cell area and
13 090
Total Cells Analyzed
Total number of epithelial cells measured in the study
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