Red nucleus structure and function: from anatomy to clinical neurosciences
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REVIEW
Red nucleus structure and function: from anatomy to clinical neurosciences Gianpaolo Antonio Basile1 · Marina Quartu2 · Salvatore Bertino1 · Maria Pina Serra2 · Marianna Boi2 · Alessia Bramanti3 · Giuseppe Pio Anastasi1 · Demetrio Milardi1,3 · Alberto Cacciola1 Received: 1 June 2020 / Accepted: 24 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The red nucleus (RN) is a large subcortical structure located in the ventral midbrain. Although it originated as a primitive relay between the cerebellum and the spinal cord, during its phylogenesis the RN shows a progressive segregation between a magnocellular part, involved in the rubrospinal system, and a parvocellular part, involved in the olivocerebellar system. Despite exhibiting distinct evolutionary trajectories, these two regions are strictly tied together and play a prominent role in motor and non-motor behavior in different animal species. However, little is known about their function in the human brain. This lack of knowledge may have been conditioned both by the notable differences between human and non-human RN and by inherent difficulties in studying this structure directly in the human brain, leading to a general decrease of interest in the last decades. In the present review, we identify the crucial issues in the current knowledge and summarize the results of several decades of research about the RN, ranging from animal models to human diseases. Connecting the dots between morphology, experimental physiology and neuroimaging, we try to draw a comprehensive overview on RN functional anatomy and bridge the gap between basic and translational research. Keywords Locomotion · Neuroimaging · Pain · Phylogenesis · Review · Skilled movements
Introduction The human red nucleus (RN) is a large subcortical structure located in the ventral midbrain, which is cytoarchitectonically divided into two histologically distinct subregions: a magnocellular, caudal region, consisting of large sparse neurons (magnocellular RN, mRN) and a rostral parvocellular part, mainly characterized by small and medium-sized neurons (parvocellular RN, pRN) (Ulfig and Chan 2002; Demetrio Milardi and Alberto Cacciola have equally contributed to the present work. * Alberto Cacciola [email protected] 1
Brain Mapping Lab, Department of Biomedical, Dental Sciences and Morphological and Functional Images, University of Messina, Messina, Italy
2
Section of Cytomorphology, Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Cagliari, Cittadella Universitaria di Monserrato, 09042 Monserrato, CA, Italy
3
IRCCS Centro Neurolesi “Bonino Pulejo”, Messina, Italy
Yamaguchi and Goto 2008; Onodera and Hicks 2009, 2010; Paxinos et al. 2012). These structures play a complementary role in different aspects of motor control (Kennedy 1990), and are likely involved in different motor disorders, such as essential tremor (ET) (Wills et al. 1994, 1995), Parkinson’s disease (PD) (Wang et al. 2016b; Guan et al. 2017) and in the recovery from pyramidal lesions (Yeo and Jang 2010; Rüber et al. 20
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