Morphometric analysis of the retina from horses infected with the Borna disease virus

Borna disease (BD) is a fatal disorder of horses, often characterized by blindness. Although degeneration of retinal neurons has been demonstrated in a rat model, there are controversial data concerning whether a similar degeneration occurs in the retina of infected horses. To investigate whether BD may cause degeneration of photoreceptors and possibly of other neuronal cells at least at later stages of the disease, we performed a detailed quantitative morphologic study of retinal tissue from Borna-diseased horses. BD was diagnosed by detection of pathognomonic Joest-Degen inclusion bodies in the postmortem brains. Paraffin sections of paraformaldehyde-fixed retinae were used for histologic and immunohistochemical stainings. Numbers of neurons and Müller glial cells were counted, and neuron-to-Müller cell ratios were calculated. Among tissues from 9 horses with BD, we found retinae with strongly altered histologic appearance as well as retinae with only minor changes. The neuron-to-Müller cell ratio for the whole retina was significantly smaller in diseased animals (8.5 +/- 0.4; P < .01) as compared with controls (17.6 +/- 0.8). It can be concluded that BD in horses causes alterations of the retinal histology of a variable degree. The study provides new data about the pathogenesis of BD concerning the retina and demonstrates that a loss of photoreceptors may explain the observed blindness in infected horses.