“…During development they undergo char acteristic changes in content and composi tion [8,13,17,25,26,33,38] and have there fore been suggested to be instructional mole cules for brain maturation. In particular, they appear to be functionally involved in the control of axonal [33] and dendritic [17] out growth, synaptogenesis [13,17] and the es tablishment of cell contact [34], In many ways, aging of the brain can be seen as the reversal of these events, with neu rons and synapses being lost [5,7], dendrites deteriorating [27,28] and myelin sheaths of neurons degenerating progressively [3]. This leads to the assumption that brain ganglio sides also change with aging, which has in fact been shown for the rat [24], Although there are extensive studies of developmental changes of human brain gangliosides during the fetal and prenatal period [22,32], studies concerning gangliosides of the adult human brain are scattered [4,10,14,[30][31][32]37], Consequently, the objective of our study was to cover the entire span of adult human life with special stress on senescence, and to re late possible changes of brain ganglioside content and composition to the structural changes described above.…”