Promoting remyelination is crucial for patients with demyelinating diseases including multiple sclerosis. However, it is still a circuitous conundrum finding a practical remyelinating therapy. Electroacupuncture (EA), originating from traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), has been widely used to treat CNS diseases all over the world, but the role of EA in demyelinating diseases is barely known. I...

Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is a member of the neurotrophin family of growth factors that through its neurotrophic tyrosine kinase, receptor, type 2 (TrkB) receptor, increases 5-bromo-2-deoxyuridine incorporation in oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs) in culture. Roles in vivo are less well understood; however, increases in numbers of OPCs are restricted in BDNF+/- mice followi...

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic inflammatory disease affecting the central nervous system (CNS). While multiple effective immunomodulatory therapies for MS exist today, they lack the scope of promoting CNS repair, in particular remyelination. Microglia play a pivotal role in regulating myelination processes, and the colony-stimulating factor 1 (CSF-1) pathway is a key regulator for microgl...

Demyelination is the cause of disability in various neurological disorders. It is therefore crucial to understand the molecular regulation of oligodendrocytes, the myelin forming cells in the CNS. Growth factors are known to be essential for the development and maintenance of oligodendrocytes and are involved in the regulation of glial responses in various pathological conditions. We employed t...

Oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs) undergo marked morphological changes to become mature oligodendrocytes, but the metabolic resources for this process have not been fully elucidated. Although lactate, a metabolic derivative of glycogen, has been reported to be consumed in oligodendrocytes as a metabolite, and to ameliorate hypomyelination induced by low glucose conditions, it is not clear...

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by demyelinated lesions. PET imaging using specific myelin radioligands might solve the lack of a specific imaging tool for diagnosing and monitoring demyelination and remyelination in MS patients. In recent years, a few tracers have been developed for in vivo PET imaging of myelin, but they have not been fully evaluated yet. ...

Stable gastric pentadecapeptide BPC 157 was suggested to link inflammatory bowel disease and multiple sclerosis, and thereby, shown to equally counteract the models of both of those diseases. For colitis, cysteamine (400 mg/kg intrarectally (1 ml/rat)) and colon-colon anastomosis (sacrifice at day 3, 5, 7, and 14) were used. BPC 157 (10 μg/kg, 10 ng/kg) was applied either intraperitoneally once...

Introduction Schizophrenia is a severe psychiatric disorder with a largely unknown etiology. A disruption in white matter connectivity, specifically oligodendrocytic loss, has been implicated in the etiogenesis of schizophrenia. Non-invasive in vivo high spatial and temporal resolution MRI techniques have become important tools in the study of pathogenesis and pathophysiology of schizophrenia. ...

Introduction: Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a common neurodegenerative disease leading to the movement disorder and destruction of myelin. Physical exercise delays the onset of neurodegenerative processes by preventing the destruction of myelin and oligodendrocytes. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of high-intensity exercise preconditioning on gene expression asso...