Climbing fiber synaptic changes correlate with clinical features in essential tremor

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Changes in the Purkinje cells (PCs) and climbing fibers (CFs) have been postulated to be involved in essential tremor (ET) disease pathogenesis.1 PCs receive 2 excitatory inputs: CFs and parallel fibers (PFs). CFs form synapses predominantly on the thick, proximal PC dendrites, whereas PFs form synapses on the thin, distal PC dendritic branchlets. CF-PC and PF-PC innervation territories on PC dendritic arbors are tightly regulated for proper PC function. We recently reported more CF-PC synapses on the thin, distal PC dendritic branchlets in ET cases than controls,2 and this pathologic feature was associated with tremor severity in a small sample of 8 ET cases. We now expand the ET case sample nearly fivefold (37 cases) and assess the association between abnormal CF-PC connections and a wider range of clinical features. The overarching goal was to begin to mark out clinical characteristics that track with pathologic features in ET.