Iron deficiency (ID) in early life alters the course of behavioral and cognitive development in humans, causing decreased physical activity and responsiveness to the environment. The effects of ID on behavior are similar in rats and hypothesized to be related to ID-related impairments in central dopamine pathways. The objective of this study was to examine the association between brain iron mea...

Bupropion is an effective medication in treating addiction and is widely used as an aid to smoking cessation. Bupropion inhibits striatal dopamine reuptake via dopamine transporter blockade, but it is unknown whether this leads to increased extracellular dopamine levels at clinical doses in man. The effects of bupropion on extracellular dopamine levels in the striatum were investigated using [(...

Previous studies demonstrated that tolerance to the long-term neurotoxic effects of methamphetamine on dopamine neurons could be induced by pretreating with multiple injections of escalating doses of methamphetamine. The mechanism(s) underlying this tolerance phenomenon is unknown. Some recent studies suggested that aberrant vesicular monoamine transporter-2 (VMAT-2) and dopamine transporter fu...

To describe a patient with drug-induced parkinsonism whose baseline dopamine transporter SPECT resulted abnormal, but whose dopaminergic neuronal density was normal. Background: In vivo imaging techniques investigating presynaptic nigrostriatal function using dopamine transporter (DAT) SPECT or 18F-Dopa PET are currently considered to reliably distinguish a degenerative parkinsonism from a iatr...

Manganese (Mn) is an essential nutrient, though exposure to high concentrations may result in neurotoxicity characterized by alterations in dopamine neurobiology. To date, it remains elusive how and why Mn targets dopaminergic neurons although recently the role of the dopamine transporter has been suggested. Our primary goal of this study was to examine the potential roles of the monoamine tran...

References 1. Morino H, Kawarai T, Izumi Y, et al. A single nucleotide polymorphism of dopamine transporter gene is associated with Parkinson’s disease. Ann Neurol 2000;47:528–531. 2. Higuchi S, Muramatsu T, Arai H, et al. Polymorphisms of dopamine receptor and transporter genes and Parkinson’s disease. J Neural Transm 1995;10:107–113. 3. Stern MB, Gur RC, Saykin AJ, et al. Dementia of Parkinso...

The exact role of dopamine transporter gene (DAT1) in the pathogenesis of bipolar disorder type 1 (BD) is not understood. In the present study, we aimed to evaluate the possible association between 30, 40 and 63 bp variable number tandem repeat (VNTR) polymorphisms of DAT1 gene and the risk of type 1 (BD) in a sample of Iranian population. This case-control study was performed on 152 BD patient...

It has been hypothesized that high-dose methamphetamine treatment rapidly redistributes cytoplasmic dopamine within nerve terminals, leading to intraneuronal reactive oxygen species formation and well characterized persistent dopamine deficits. We and others have reported that in addition to this persistent damage, methamphetamine treatment rapidly decreases vesicular dopamine uptake, as assess...