Relationships between typical histopathological hallmarks and the ferritin in the hippocampus from patients with Alzheimer’s disease

Oxidative stress is one of the possible mechanisms of neurodegeneration. One of the elements of this mechanism are altered iron homeostasis and changes concerning of iron metabolism regulatory proteins. The primary iron storage protein in cells is ferritin, composed of heavy (H) and light (L) chains. In brain tissue neurons contain mainly ferritin H-chains, whereas glial cells are rich in L-chains. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that compares structure of ferritin and histopathological hallmarks in hippocampal tissue affected by the pathological process of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Our data indicate a statistically significant correlation between the concentration of L chains of ferritin, the H/L ratio and the amount of senile plaques in the subiculum, CA1 and CA4 sectors of the hippocampus (p<0.001, p=0.025, p=0.029). A significant correlation was also found between the concentration of L-ferritin and neuronal loss (p=0.0026). These findings indicate an important role of ferritin light chains in neurodegeneration, that is linked to chronic inflammation processes and the associated activation of the microglia rich of L chains.