CONGO RED FLUORESCENCE CIRCUMVENTS PITFALLS IN MORP HO METRIC QUANTITATION OF AMYLOID IN TISSUE SECTIONS

摘要

Quantitation of amyloid deposits in tissue sections represents a direct method to precisely measure the amount of amyloid in patients and animals. The exact quantifying of amyloid allows evaluating the different therapies used to treat underlying disease in amyloidosis and comparing their efficacy to control amyloidogenic progression. Quantification of amyloid has been performed in brain tissue [1], in renal biopsies [2,3] and in liver biopsies [4] after immunohistochemical identification of amyloid using various chromogens. These results not only demonstrated fairly exact morphornetric computer-aided quantification of amyloid [2-4], but also illustrated a remarkable disappearance of amyloid from the liver in a patient with successfully treated juvenile rheumatoid arthritis within several years [4]. In spite of this progress, there remains the question of which of the markers should be used for the identification of amyloid in order to improve precision, a high signal to background value (=specificity value), so as to measure the amount of amyloid exactly.