I am grateful to Anthony Lohman, Rudolf Nieuwenhuys, Jan Voogd and Antoine Keyser for their support during my academic career from comparative and developmental neuroanatomy to clinical neuroanatomy.
George Padberg and Berry Kremer made this project possible. This resulted in a fruitful collaboration with neurologists and especially the neuropathologists Pieter Wesseling and Martin Lammens. The idea for this book arose when I moved from the Department of Anatomy and Embryology to the Department of Neurology, both of the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre. It tries to bridge the gap between neuroanatomy and clinical neurology and emphasizes human and primate data in the context of the many disorders of brain circuitry so common in neurological practice. This book is on brain circuitry (“systems anatomy”) and its disorders. The basal nucleus of Meynert and the extended amygdala are involved in some of the most devastating neuropsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer disease. Parkinson disease may begin in the caudal brain stem, years before affecting the substantia nigra, and then it progresses rostrally to reach limbic and cortical areas. Neuronal death in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, spinocerebellar disorders and various intoxications, the distribution of neurofibrillary tangles in Alzheimer disease and atrophy in olivopontocerebellar degeneration progress through neuronal connections. Information flows along connections, growth factors and also viruses are transported along connections, epileptic discharges are spread through connections, and when they are deprived of connections, neurons pine away and may die through retrograde degeneration (dying back degeneration) or through anterograde transneuronal degeneration.
Connections define the functions of neurons. Knowledge of how the various parts of the CNS are interconnected to form functional systems is a prerequisite for the proper understanding of data from other fields in the neurosciences. Much of our knowledge of the organization of the CNS, however, we still owe to the classic studies of Vicq d'Azyr, Edinger, Dejerine, Flechsig, Brodmann, the Vogts, Foerster and many others, anatomists as well as neurologists, who painstakingly examined fresh and later fixed brains and laid down the framework for the main circuits in the human brain and spinal cord. New developments in MR imaging such as diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) allow the visualization of at least the major fibre connections in the human CNS. Modern imaging techniques such as positron emission tomography (PET) and functional MRI (fMRI) have greatly improved our knowledge of the circuitry of the human CNS. Описание: During the last decade, there have been tremendous technical developments to study the human central nervous system (CNS) and its connectivity.
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