Progress in neuro-psychopharmacology & biological psychiatry
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Prog. Neuropsychopharmacol. Biol. Psychiatry · Jun 2011
Comorbid obsessive-compulsive personality disorder in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD): a marker of severity.
Comorbid obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) is well-described in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). It remains unclear, however, whether OCPD in OCD represents a distinct subtype of OCD or whether it is simply a marker of severity in OCD. ⋯ The majority of our findings suggest that in OCD, patients with OCPD do not have a highly distinctive phenomenological or genetic profile, but rather that OCPD represents a marker of severity.
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Prog. Neuropsychopharmacol. Biol. Psychiatry · Jun 2011
Curcumin enhances neuronal survival in N-methyl-d-aspartic acid toxicity by inducing RANTES expression in astrocytes via PI-3K and MAPK signaling pathways.
Neuroinflammation, which is characterized by the overproduction of cytokines and chemokines, plays an important role in neurodegenerative diseases, especially in Alzheimer's disease (AD). In the brain, chemokines are predominantly released by astrocytes and microglias. Expression of RANTES, as well as other cytokines, is involved in the inflammatory cascade that contributes to neurodegeneration in AD. Expression of RANTES may also have a neuroprotective effect. We sought to investigate whether curcumin exhibited neuroprotective and antioxidant activity via enhanced RANTES expression by astrocytes in cortical neuron cultures. We evaluated the neuroprotective and anti-neurodegenerative effects of curcumin in NMDA toxicity and in long-term cultures. ⋯ We postulate that the enhanced neuronal survival by curcumin treatment in NMDA toxicity and long-term cultures was in part attributable to elevated astrocyte-derived RANTES expression via activation of PI3K/MAPK signaling pathways.