Microglia in the Cerebral Cortex in Autism

In Table 5 of Lyck et al. (2009) the column headed “total neocortex” refers to the neocortical gray matter only. In their methods Section 2.2.7, “Estimation of Cell Numbers,” they describe their selection of the region of interest, saying, “… followed by delineation the border between white matter and neocortex at 210× magnification (10 × lens) marking the white matter as ‘exclusive region’,” indicating that their cell number estimates were made from a region that excluded white matter. Further, Fig. 2b from this paper indicates that the brain slices were segmented into “frontal neocortex,” “temporal neocortex,” “parietal neocortex,” “occipital neocortex,” and “white matter,” implying that the various neocortex segments do not include white matter. Thus, in Table 5 the column heads “frontal cortex,” “temporal cortex,” etc. presumably refer specifically to the gray matter portions of those regions, and “total neocortex” (which is a sum of the other four columns) also includes only gray matter.