Affiliations: [a] Department of Medicine, Unit of Molecular Neurosciences, University Campus-Biomedico, Rome, Italy
| [b] Department of Experimental Neurosciences, Laboratory of Molecular Neurosciences, IRCCS Santa Lucia Foundation, Rome, Italy
| [c] Neuroimaging Laboratory, IRCCS Santa Lucia Foundation, Rome, Italy
| [d] Department of Neuroscience, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, University of Sussex, Brighton, East Sussex, UK
Correspondence:
[*]
Correspondence to: Professor Marcello D’Amelio, Department of Medicine, University Campus Biomedico, via Alvaro del Portillo, 21; I-00128 Rome, Italy. E-mail: [email protected].
Abstract: Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive neurological disorder characterized by several cognitive and non-cognitive symptoms, with episodic memory being the earliest and most prominently impaired cognitive function. Dopaminergic signals are required for encoding hippocampal memory for new events and the ventral tegmental area (VTA), together with the locus coeruleus, are the primary sources of dopamine acting on dopaminergic receptors in the hippocampus. With this in mind, a recent study on a validated mouse model of AD highlighted on the hippocampal dysfunction and its correlation with an early degeneration of dopaminergic neurons in the VTA. In this issue, De Marco and Venneri test the hypothesis that the volume of the VTA nucleus in humans might be associated with cognitive features of AD.
Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease, dopamine, hippocampus, memory, midbrain, ventral tegmental area
