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The Cerebellum

, Volume 17, Issue 2, pp 243–246 | Cite as

The Neglected Cerebello-Limbic Pathways and Neuropsychological Features of the Cerebellum in Emotion

  • Paolo Flace
  • Angelo Quartarone
  • Giovanni Colangelo
  • Demetrio Milardi
  • Alberto Cacciola
  • Giuseppina Rizzo
  • Paolo Livrea
  • Giuseppe Anastasi
Letter to the Editor
First Online:

Sir,

We would like to thank Adamaszek and colleagues for the consensus paper about the role cerebellum played in the modulation of the emotions and in mood disorders [1]. The emotional role of the cerebellum is a recent concept [2, 3, 4, 5], and at the present time, various studies demonstrate that a circumscribed topographic cerebellar-limbic compartment does not exist [3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9].

The cerebellar neural circuits involved in emotions traditionally include the cerebellar cortex of the posterior vermal, the paravermal lobules, and the fastigial nucleus [1, 3, 8], even though, the cerebellar interconnections with the limbic structures are less known. However, some clear connections have been described using contemporary methods, such as retrograde-anterograde tracer, electrophysiological stimulation, electrolytic lesions, and magnetic resonance functional connectivity [6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31].

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Notes

Compliance with Ethical Standards

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interests.

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© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Basic Medical Sciences, Neuroscience and Sense OrgansUniversity of Bari ‘Aldo Moro’BariItaly
  2. 2.Department of Life ScienceBrunel UniversityLondonUK
  3. 3.Department of Biomedical, Dental Sciences and Morphological and Functional ImagesUniversity of MessinaMessinaItaly
  4. 4.IRCCS Centro Neurolesi ‘Bonino Pulejo’MessinaItaly

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