Background: The ventral tegmental area (VTA), containing mesolimbic and mesocortical dopaminergic neurons, is implicated in processes involving reward, addiction, reinforcement, and learning, which are associated with a variety of neuropsychiatric disorders. Electrical stimulation of the VTA or the medial forebrain bundle and its projection target the nucleus accumbens (NAc) is reported to impr...

Anxiety is an unpleasant physiological state in which an overreaction to a situation occurs. It has been suggested that different brain regions are involved in the modulation and expression of anxiety, including the amygdala, hippocampus, and frontal cortex. Dysfunction of neurotransmitters and their receptors can lead to many mood disorders like anxiety. There are evidences that dopamine plays...

In vivo microdialysis coupled with HPLC and radioimmuno-assay techniques were used to analyze dopamine (DA) and neurotensin (NT) in prefrontal cortical extracellular fluid following electrical stimulation of mesocortical axons. The release (overflow into the extracellular fluid) of both DA and NT increased with increasing number of impulses and with frequency. At the lowest frequency tested (2....

Studies in nonhuman primates documented that appropriate stimulation of dopamine (DA) D1 receptors in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is critical for working memory processing. The defective ability of patients with schizophrenia at working memory tasks is a core feature of this illness. It has been postulated that this impairment relates to a deficiency in mesocortical DA function. ...

The present review surveys a broad range of findings on the functions of the rodent prefrontal cortex (PFC) in the context of the known pathophysiology of attentiondeficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). An overview of clinical findings concludes that dysfunction of the right PFC plays a critical role in ADHD and that a number of early developmental factors conspire to increase the risk of the d...

glaucoma, a group of multifactor ocular diseases, is the second leading cause of blindness worldwide. primary open angle (poa) is the most common type of glaucoma, characterized by progressive optic nerve degeneration. numerous genes and proteins have been revealed to be associated with poag, but the pathologic mechanisms of the disease are still poorly understood. proteomics, the collective st...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) causes progressive deterioration of cognition and behavior. Memory dysfunction is the hallmark, but there are also changes in behavior, emotion and autonomic functions, which cannot be explained simply as a consequence of memory impairment. These observations suggest that the natural disease process of AD involves not only memory-related neural structures, but also spec...

In Parkinson's disease (PD) degeneration of mesocortical dopaminergic projections may determine cognitive and behavioral symptoms. Choice reaction time task is related to attention, working memory, and goal-directed behavior. Such paradigm involves frontal cortical circuits receiving mesocortical dopamine which are affected early in PD. The aim of this study is to characterize the role of dopam...

Parkinsonism leads to various electrophysiological changes in the basal ganglia-thalamocortical system (BGTCS), often including elevated discharge rates of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) and the output nuclei, and reduced activity of the globus pallidus external (GPe) segment. These rate changes have been explained qualitatively in terms of the direct/indirect pathway model, involving projection...