Following infection of exposed peripheral tissues, neurotropic alphaherpesviruses invade nerve endings and deposit their DNA genomes into the nuclei of neurons resident in ganglia of the peripheral nervous system. The end result of these events is the establishment of a life-long latent infection. Neuroinvasion typically requires efficient viral transmission through a polarized epithelium follo...

Tardive Dyskinesia (TD) is a hyperkinetic movement disorder caused by chronic treatment of psychiatric patients with dopamine (DA) receptor blocking drugs (Stacy & Jankovic 1991). Although TD is one of the most important and frequently encountered iatrogenic disorders in clinical medicine, its pathophysiology is poorly understood. We have observed a hyperkinetic movement disorder in rats experi...

The development of new drugs to combat neuroinflammation is highly relevant as it opens up possibilities for the treatment a wide range diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s epilepsy, schizophrenia, depression, and others. Kappa-opioid agonists represent promising class compounds with а high potential be used in neurological conditions accompanied by neuroinflammation. aim study ...

A 79-year-old woman developed an orbital mass five and a half years after excision of a cutaneous melanoma from the side of the nose. The initial orbital biopsy was interpreted histopathologically as a malignant fibrous histiocytoma, but special stains and electron microscopy showed it to be a desmoplastic malignant melanoma which had apparently spread to the orbit from the prior skin lesion by...

Virus-induced diseases of the central nervous system (CNS) represent a significant burden to human health worldwide. The complexity of these diseases is influenced by the sheer number of different neurotropic viruses, the diverse routes of CNS entry, viral tropism, and the immune system. Using a combination of human pathological data and experimental animal models, we have begun to uncover many...

BACKGROUND The clinical management of H5N1 influenza virus infection in humans remains unclear. Combination chemotherapy with drugs that target different viral proteins might be more effective than monotherapy. METHODS BALB/c mice were treated by oral gavage for 5 days with amantadine (1.5, 15 or 30 mg/kg/day) and oseltamivir (1 or 10 mg/kg/day) separately or in combination. Mice were challen...

Pharmacological-functional imaging provides a non-invasive method by which the actions of neurotropic drugs on the human brain can be explored. Simply put, it assesses how neural activity patterns associated with cognitive functions of interest are modified by a drug challenge. Since one of the most widely-used cognitive-enhancing drugs in clinical practice are cholinesterase inhibitors, this t...

Enterovirus 71 (EV-A71) is a neurotropic virus that can cause severe complications involving the central nervous system. No effective antiviral therapeutics are available for treating EV-A71 infection and drug discovery efforts are rarely focused to target this disease. Thus, the main goal of this study was to discover existing drugs with novel indications that may effectively inhibit EV-A71 re...