Healthy Living

Understanding Dopamine's Role in Parkinson's Disease

Treatment has gotten better

Thanks to a better understanding of this pathway, many neuropsychiatric illnesses are treated in a superior way with the help of drugs that can change the availability of dopamine and serotonin in the brain cells. In fact, many such drugs remain the first line treatment of disorders like Parkinson's, anxiety, depression, attention deficit disorder, and much more.

References

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  2. Luo SX, Huang EJ. Dopaminergic Neurons and Brain Reward Pathways: From Neurogenesis to Circuit Assembly. Am J Pathol. 2016 Mar;186(3):478–88.
  3. Camara E, Rodriguez-Fornells A, Münte TF. Functional Connectivity of Reward Processing in the Brain. Front Hum Neurosci [Internet]. 2009 Jan 16 [cited 2017 Nov 11];2. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2647336/
  4. Volkow ND, Wang G-J, Baler RD. Reward, dopamine and the control of food intake: implications for obesity. Trends Cogn Sci. 2011 Jan;15(1):37–46.
  5. Torta DME, Castelli L. Reward pathways in Parkinson’s disease: Clinical and theoretical implications. Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences. 2008 Apr 1;62(2):203–13.
  6. Clark AM. Reward processing: a global brain phenomenon? J Neurophysiol. 2013 Jan 1;109(1):1–4.