Abstract
Amyloid-beta plaques are prominent biological markers in dementia brains. In response to plaque formation, the brain's immune cells, microglia, become reactive. Microglia are measurable cells that surround amyloid-beta plaques, indicating their location. A system of partial differential equations describes the concentration of microglia in dementia brains by incorporating chemotactic signaling. However, this system fails to incorporate increasing numbers of reactive microglia cells in response to amyloid-beta aggregation. A system of ordinary differential equations describing the number of significant cells and proteins in the brain suggests the amount of reactive microglia increases significantly during the progression of dementia. We couple these two systems to examine the influence of increasing amounts of reactive microglia on microglia concentration, which is indicative of amyloid-beta plaques. We compare the results of these systems to data and confirm the ability to predict the width of the aggregated microglia clusters when increasing amounts of microglia are included.
Recommended Citation
Kinney, Adrienne C. and Swanson, Ellen R.
(2017)
"Modeling Aggregation of Proliferating Microglia in Response to Amyloid-beta in Dementia,"
Spora: A Journal of Biomathematics: Vol. 3, .
DOI: http://doi.org/10.30707/SPORA3.1Kinney
Available at:
https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/spora/vol3/iss1/4
