Many patients are taking psychiatric drugs for years despite little knowledge about their long-term harms. Here, we summarise the findings of whether psychiatric drug exposure causes long-term harms in mammals after a drug-free period. We searched PubMed, Biosis and Embase for controlled animal studies (no behavioural priming; behavioural assessments performed after a 90 day drug-free period). ...

BACKGROUND Striatal enlargement with chronic neuroleptic treatment in schizophrenic patients has been reported by several investigators. Longitudinal magnetic resonance imaging studies of patients suggest that changes in striatal volume may be caused by treatment with antipsychotic medication. METHODS We have examined the effects of chronic neuroleptic treatment on postmortem striatal volume ...

Reserpine-induced catalepsy is an animal model used to mimic the behavioural symptoms of Parkinson’s disease (PD) in experimental animals. The present study was designed to investigate the effect of aqueous and hydro-ethanolic extracts of Sida cordifolia (AESC and EESC respectively), in reserpine-induced orofacial dyskinesia and catalepsy along with lipid peroxidation evaluated by the levels of...

The effect of ethanolic extract of Coriandrum sativum L. seeds (100, 200 mg/kg) was studied on tacrine induced orofacial dyskinesia. Tacrine (2.5 mg/kg, i.p.) treated animals were observed for vacuous chewing movements (VCM), tongue protrusions (TP) and orofacial bursts (OB) for 1 h followed by observations for locomotor changes and cognitive dysfunction. Sub-chronic administration of Coriandru...

The present study was undertaken to determine the firing patterns and the mechanoreceptive field (RF) properties of neurons within the face primary motor cortex (face-MI) in relation to chewing and other orofacial movements in the awake monkey. Of a total of 107 face-MI neurons recorded, 73 of 74 tested had activity related to chewing and 47 of 66 neurons tested showed activity related to a tra...

Tardive dyskinesia (TD) is a late-onset side effect mainly affecting the orofacial region of patients treated chronically with classic antipsychotic drugs such as haloperidol (HAL). The causes of TD remain unknown. We hypothesized that faulty synaptic re-organization might be related to TD-like syndromes and used the vacuous chewing movements (VCM) model in rats to investigate the expression of...

3-nitropropionic acid (3-NP)-induced neurotoxicity causes a cellular energy deficit and oxidative stress via an irreversible inhibition of the mitochondrial enzyme succinate dehydrogenase (SDH). Systemic administration of 3-NP causes motor and cognitive deficits, particularly those associated with excessive free radical generation. Recently, carvedilol has been implicated as a neuroprotectant i...

The use of antipsychotic drugs represents an important approach for the treatment of schizophrenia. However, their efficacy is limited to certain symptoms of this disorder, and they induce serious side effects. As a result, there is a strong demand for the development of new drugs, which depends on reliable animal models for pharmacological characterization. The present review discusses the fac...