Организация, в которой проходила защита:
Barnard College
Год защиты:2020
Аннотация:Suicide is the tenth leading cause of death in the United States with an average of 129 suicides per day. Personal, emotional, and societal costs incurred by attempted and completed suicide cannot be recompensed. Understanding the neurobiology of suicide is only possible through the postmortem investigation of suicide completers’ brains.While clinical studies have broadened our understanding of suicidal behavior, they have not produced effective results in decreasing the number of suicides. Biological research in suicide aims to identify neurobiological changes associated with completed suicide, with the goal of identifying novel biomarkers and therapeutic targets to predict and prevent suicide. We have previously found that microglia are differentially activated in dorsal and ventral prefrontal white matter such that there is more activation ventrally in suicide cases and the opposite in non-suicide cases (Schnieder et al., 2014). We also found a greater density of immunoreactive cells near the walls of blood vessels (Schnieder et al., 2014). These findings prompted us to investigate possible alterations in the integrity of the blood-brain barrier (BBB) and involvement of peripheral immune cells in brain pathology associated with completed suicide (Schnieder et al., 2019). To understand if this cross-talk is linked to changes in the integrity of the blood-brain barrier, we investigated if suicide is associated with increased extravasation of the plasma protein, fibrinogen, into the brain parenchyma. To determine the contribution of extravasated fibrinogen, and therefore inflammation, to completed suicide, we quantified areas of extravasated fibrinogen around blood vessels in dorsal and ventral prefrontal white matter.