Microglia Cells In Brain Disease

By Frontiers in cellular neuroscience - http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fncel.2013.00049/full, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31788649

Microglia cells, immune cells of the central nervous system, are increasingly being linked as involved with a number of brain/neurodegenerative diseases.  This opens up the way for possible therapies; abstract:

There has been an explosion of new findings recently giving us insights into the involvement of microglia in central nervous system (CNS) disorders. A host of new molecular tools and mouse models of disease are increasingly implicating this enigmatic type of nervous system cell as a key player in conditions ranging from neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism to neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and chronic pain. Contemporaneously, diverse roles are emerging for microglia in the healthy brain, from sculpting developing neuronal circuits to guiding learning-associated plasticity. Understanding the physiological functions of these cells is crucial to determining their roles in disease. Here we focus on recent developments in our rapidly expanding understanding of the function, as well as the dysfunction, of microglia in disorders of the CNS.