Decreased noradrenergic excitation of hypoglossal motoneurons during sleep causing hypotonia of pharyngeal dilator muscles is a major contributor to the pathogenesis of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), a widespread disease for which treatment options are limited. Previous OSA drug candidates targeting various excitatory/inhibitory receptors on hypoglossal motoneurons have proved unviable in react...

An imbalance between cholinergic and noradrenergic neurotransmission has been proposed for the etiology of affective disorders. According to this hypothesis, depression would be the result of enhanced cholinergic and reduced noradrenergic neurotransmission. Repeated electroconvulsive shock (ECS) is an effective treatment for depression; moreover, in laboratory animals it induces changes in brai...

While posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is relatively common among psychiatric conditions, it only emerges in a subpopulation of persons exposed to environmental trauma (1). Brain noradrenergic system dysfunction has been implicated in development of PTSD (2). However, unknown is the extent to which polymorphisms in brain noradrenergic system genes interact with childhood environmental traum...

Although nitrous oxide (N(2)O) has been used to facilitate surgery for >150 years, its molecular mechanism of action is not yet defined. Having established that N(2)O-induced release of norepinephrine mediates the analgesic action at alpha(2) adrenoceptors in the spinal cord, we now investigated whether activation of noradrenergic nuclei in the brainstem is responsible for this analgesic action...

BACKGROUND Noradrenaline reuptake inhibitors are known to produce analgesia through a spinal action but they also act in the brain. However, the action of noradrenaline on supraspinal pain control regions is understudied. The authors addressed the noradrenergic modulation of the dorsal reticular nucleus (DRt), a medullary pronociceptive area, in the spared nerve injury (SNI) model of neuropathi...

Noradrenergic neurons in the locus coeruleus (LC) play a critical role in many functions including learning and memory. This relatively small population of cells sends widespread projections throughout the brain including to a number of regions such as the amygdala which is involved in emotional associative learning and the medial prefrontal cortex which is important for facilitating flexibilit...

to glutamate before the establishment of synaptic connections with mitral cells at the more distal portions of their dendritic arbors (Panzanelli et al., 2009). In addition, olfactory deprivation differentially affects spine density in the distal and proximal dendritic domains, where respectively centripetal and centrifugal synaptic connections take place (Kelsch et al., 2009). Hence, the role ...

Intracisternal (i.c.) and intravenous (i.v.) administration of methyldopa in conscious rabbits produced closely similar changes in hemodynamics, heart rate, and falls in plasma norepinephrine levels. Two weeks after giving i.c. 6-hydroxydopamine (6-OHDA), when there is widespread destruction of central noradrenergic neurons, the effects of i.c. methyldopa virtually were abolished. This suggests...