Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is a neurotrophin critically involved in cell survival, synaptic plasticity, and memory. BDNF has recently garnered significant attention as a potential therapeutic target for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer disease (AD), but emerging evidence suggests that BDNF may also be mechanistically involved in the pathogenesis of AD. AD patients have...

BDNF and its gene polymorphism may be important in synaptic plasticity and neuron survival, and may become a key target in the physiopathology of long-term heroin use. Thus, we investigated the relationships between brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) plasma concentrations and the BDNF Val66Met nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) in heroin-dependent patients. The pretreatment expression levels o...

Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and its receptor, tropomyosin-related kinase receptor B (TrkB), play a critical role in activity-dependent plasticity processes such as long-term potentiation, learning, and memory. It has been shown that BDNF exerts different or even opposite effects on behavior depending on the neural circuit. However, the detailed role of BDNF in memory process on the...

The biosynthesis of endogenous brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) has thus far been examined in neurons where it is expressed at very low levels, in an activity-dependent fashion. In humans, BDNF has long been known to accumulate in circulating platelets, at levels far higher than in the brain. During the process of blood coagulation, BDNF is released from platelets, which has led to its ...

The brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) Val66Met polymorphism is a common human single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) that affects the regulated release of BDNF, and has been implicated in affective disorders and cognitive dysfunction. A decreased activation of the infralimbic medial prefrontal cortex (IL-mPFC), a brain region critical for the regulation of affective behaviors, has been des...

INTRODUCTION Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) was first identified in the intervertebral disc (IVD) when its molecular upregulation was observed in sections of nucleus pulposus cultured under conditions of increased osmolarity. BDNF is now known to be involved in a number of biologic functions, including regulation of differentiation/survival of sensory neurons, regulation of nociceptiv...

Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) has been shown to be necessary and sufficient for post-stroke recovery in rodents. From these observations, we and others have hypothesized that a common single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) in the pro-domain of bdnf that leads to a methionine (Met) substitution for valine (Val) at codon 66 (Val66Met) will affect stroke outcome. Here we investigate the e...

BACKGROUND: Accumulating evidence points to the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) as a biomarker for neuropsychiatric diseases, such as major depression. Mature BDNF is synthesized from its precursor form, proBDNF. Although BDNF levels in human blood can be measured using commercially available human BDNF ELISA kits, due to limited specificity of the BDNF antibody, these kits are unable ...

Expression of the neurotrophin brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and its receptor trkB in the ganglion cell layer of the Xenopus retina during retinal ganglion cell (RGC) dendritic arborization indicates that BDNF is spatially and temporally available to influence RGC morphological differentiation (; ). BDNF promotes RGC axon arborization in vivo by acting as a target-derived trophic fac...

Levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) are reduced in specific brain regions in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and BDNF gene polymorphisms have been suggested to influence AD risk, hippocampal function, and memory. We investigated whether the polymorphisms at the BDNF 196 and 270 loci were associated with AD in a clinical and neuropathological cohort of 116 AD cases and 77 control subject...