Journal
AGING AND DISEASE
Volume 12, Issue 8, Pages 2080-2095Publisher
INT SOC AGING & DISEASE
DOI: 10.14336/AD.2021.04017
Keywords
aging; neuro-glia-vascular unit; energy metabolism
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Funding
- Provincial Nature Science Foundation of Anhui Province [1308085MH158]
- National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke
- National Institutes of Health [R01NS079792]
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The neuro-glia-vascular unit (NGVU) plays a crucial role in neurodegenerative diseases, particularly in relation to aging, offering new directions for future research.
An emerging concept termed the neuro-glia-vascular unit (NGVU) has been established in recent years to understand the complicated mechanism of multicellular interactions among vascular cells, glial cells, and neurons. It has been proverbially reported that the NGVU is significantly associated with neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD), and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Physiological aging is an inevitable progression associated with oxidative damage, bioenergetic alterations, mitochondrial dysfunction, and neuroinflammation, which is partially similar to the pathology of AD. Thus, senescence is regarded as the background for the development of neurodegenerative diseases. With the exacerbation of global aging, senescence is an increasingly serious problem in the medical field. In this review, the coupling of each component, including neurons, glial cells, and vascular cells, in the NGVU is described in detail. Then, various mechanisms of age-dependent impairment in each part of the NGVU are discussed. Moreover, the potential bioenergetic alterations between different cell types in the NGVU are highlighted, which seems to be an emerging physiopathology associated with the aged brain. Bioenergetic intervention in the NGVU may be a new direction for studies on delaying or diminishing aging in the future.
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