Experimental Cerebral Malaria Spreads along the Rostral Migratory Stream
Fig 2
Edema spreads along the RMS in rostral-to-caudal direction.
A: Edema, seen as hyperintense (bright on T2*-weighted images) signal, started in the OB (white arrows in left column of A) and with progressive disease (from top to bottom) continued to spread from there along the RMS to the subventricular zone of the lateral ventricles. At high magnification zooms (right column with zoom region indicated in middle column) the involvement of the subcallosal subventricular zone and the dorsal migratory stream is apparent, but does not include the corpus callosum (“cc”) per se (arrowhead in focused magnifications and solid white single arrow on lower image in left column). Rostral-to-caudal extension was associated very closely with disease manifestation and progression both defined by decreasing RMCBS (RMCBS values are denoted on left of A). B: Schematic drawing of neurogenic regions in the mouse brain is presented. Neuroblasts migrate in the direction of the thick solid black curved arrow from the subventricular zone (SVZ) along the rostral-migratory-stream (RMS) to the olfactory bulb (OB) or along the dorsal-migratory-stream (DMS) above the hippocampus towards the occipital cortex (short curved thin black arrow pointing to right margin of image). C: T2 relaxation time increased in the RMS+OB early in the disease, when mice did not show evident clinical symptoms and was significantly elevated in progressive disease (RMCBS 15–10 and 9–0 each with p<0.05 versus baseline as indicated by asterisk, solid black line and circles indicating data for RMS+OB). A neuroanatomical landmark indicating transition to severe ECM is involvement of the dorsal-migratory-stream (DMS) showing significantly elevated T2 times in RMCBS 9–0 (p<0.05, asterisk). At this stage, also further spread into the external capsule and eventually into deeper brain structures and the brainstem occured (all <0.05 for severe ECM with RMCBS 9–0).