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Functional and Pathophysiological-morphological Correlates of Neurodegenerative Diseases
Dušek, Pavel ; Roth, Jan (advisor) ; Baláž, Marek (referee) ; Menšíková, Kateřina (referee)
This doctoral thesis pictures neurodegenerative diseases as a multilevel process, describes various correlates on each pathophysiological level, and presents selected correlates in Huntington's disease and mitochondrial membrane protein-associated neurodegeneration (MPAN). It uses various methodological approaches such as basic laboratory research, clinical work, imaging, database formation, and database summary. Changes in the amount of respiratory chain complex I and respiratory chain complex IV in buccal ep- ithelial cells of Huntington's disease patients are described. The insufficient power of optical coherence tomography as a biomarker in Huntington's disease is demonstrated. Various phenotypes of MPAN are summarized, and an association between C19orf12 mutation and visual impairment is confirmed. A phenotype of a well-documented case of MPAN is presented. Keywords: C19orf12 mutation; color discrimination; contrast sensitivity; huntingtin; Huntington's disease; iron accumulation; mitochondrial membrane-protein associated neurodegeneration; multilevel process; neurodegeneration; optical coherence tomogra- phy; parkinsonism; respiratory chain complex; retinal nerve fiber layer thickness
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Disorders of brain energy metabolism in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease
Řezáčová, Adéla ; Telenský, Petr (advisor) ; Kolář, David (referee)
Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases belong to group of neurodegenerative diseases that affect not only the patients, but also their surroundings. Patients of those diseases gradually lose their neurons. Both disorders are typical for pathophysiological accumulation of proteins which affect the functioning of neurons and astrocytes. These disorders are also characterised by mitochondrial senescence and its damages which itself manifest by dysfunction of various complexes. Furthermore, in both diseases, there can be found insulin resistance, which leads to an insufficient insulin signalization. Both diseases are also accompanied by impaired metabolisms of amino acids. With Alzheimer's disease, there is significantly lowered metabolism of glucose, whereas with Parkinson's disease, there is not enough stimulation for action potential to proceed in dopaminergic neurons in substantia nigra. These impairments in Alzheimer's disease cause cognitive dysfunction, while with Parkinson's disease, these defects predominantly lead to complications with motor function. By studying energetic changes in presented diseases could bring more effective treatment.
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Analysis of the spectrum of genetic variants associated with development of Parkinson's disease
Stočesová, Lucie ; Hirschfeldová, Kateřina (advisor) ; Fajkusová, Lenka (referee)
Parkinson's disease (PD) is one of the most common neurodegenerative disease in humans. It affects all age categories and the number of patients with this disease is still growing. However, the genetic cause of PD is not yet very clear and new and new candidate genes are constantly being discovered. The aim of the thesis is to perform a mutation analysis in a group of patients and controls from the Czech population and thus find possible genetic causes of parkinsonism in a cohort of researched patients. The second aim is to evaluate data correlation obtained by different methods. Next generation sequencing was used for this purpose. The results of this sequencing were verified with methods such as MLPA (Multiplex Ligation-Dependent Probe Amplification), analysis of short tandem repeats and Sanger sequencing. Using these methods, we obtained a wide range of possible genetic causes of parkinsonism in the studied group of patients. Patogenic or risk variants were found not only in classical candidate genes typical for PD (called PARK), but also in genes associated with other neurodegenerative diseases. For less than half of the patients (42,64 %), the genetic cause of parkinsonism was not found. Using several methods, we found that next generation sequencing is a very precise method, that can well...
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