Somatostatin immunoreactivity in neuritic plaques of Alzheimer's patients

Senile dementia of the Alzheimer's type can be diagnosed with certainty only by examining neurofibrillary tangles and neuritic plaques under the microscope^1-4. Recently, it has been suggested that the condition is linked to specific neurotransmitter systems⁵, with a decline of cortical acetylcholine, choline acetyl-transferase^5-8, cholinergic neurones projecting to the cortex^9-11, cortical noradrenaline content¹², locus coeruleus neurones^13,14 and cortical somatostatic content¹⁵. Using immunocytochemical methods ¹⁶, we here report that somatostatin-immunoreactive processes are present in neuritic plaques in human Alzheimer's specimens¹⁷. These data, as well as other reports of non-cholinergic changes^18,19, strongly imply that Alzheimer's disease cannot be linked exclusively to cortical cholinergic elements, as proposed previously⁸. Rather, our data on plaque and somatostatin co-localization and distribution patterns suggest that Alzheimer's neuropathology may involve primarily the loss of selective cortical neurones that are targets of the implicated transmitter systems and that plaque formation may result from the degeneration of presynaptic and postsynaptic neurites of large projection neurones in layers III and V. Given the neurochemically heterogeneous input to these cells, it is not surprising that several neutrotransmitter systems, one of which is somatostatin, are implicated in the pathology of Alzheimer's disease.