Current Pharmaceutical Design - Volume 18, Issue 1, 2012

The year 2012 will see the production of the 18th issue of Current Pharmaceutical Design. CPD was launched in 1996 and published 40 articles that year and 40 articles the next. In the last two years completed at the time of this writing (2009 and 2010), CPD published 766 articles, a nearly 10 fold increase. It is interesting to compare the world of CPD in 1996-7 to that of 2009-10 as a microcosm of the changes that have occurr Read More

The incidence of neurodegenerative disease is increasing mostly in western countries due to the many cofactors involved. Among them, environmental factors (contaminants, pollution, climatic changes), antigenic pressure (microbial infections), life style disorders (smoke, alcohol, diet) as well as alteration of intestinal microbiota seem to represent the major etiopathogenic determinants of neurodegeneration. Nutr Read More

Dietary antioxidant compounds, due to their pivotal role in the modulation of cellular redox mechanisms, are gaining attention of researchers in the field of brain aging and related degenerative diseases. In this perspective, green tea (GT) can be an excellent resource, as it contains large amounts of brain-accessible polyphenols. Many of these compounds are monomeric catechins, which have been shown to exert antioxid Read More

Age-related neurodegeneration in the brain and retina is complicated. It comprises a series of events encompassing different modes of degeneration in neurons, as well as inflammation mediated by glial cells. Systemic inflammation and risk factors can contribute to disease progression. Age-related conditions such as Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD) and Age-related Macular Degeneration (A Read More

The polyphenolic compound resveratrol (3,4',5-trihydroxystilbene) is a naturally occurring phytochemical which has been found in more than 70 plant species, including herbs and human food products such as grapes, berries, and peanuts. Resveratrol was first isolated in 1940; however, little attention was paid to it until its benefits in coronary heart disease were studied in 1992. Since then, increasing evidence has indicated th Read More

Parkinson disease (PD) and Alzheimer disease (AD) are neurodegenerative processes whose frequency is dramatically increasing in the western world. Both diseases share a common pathogenic denominator characterized by an exaggerated activation of the systemic and cerebral immune system, respectively. For instance, lipopolysaccharides in PD and amyloid beta in AD trigger microglia and astrocytes to release reactive Read More

The onset of neurodegenerative diseases has become more frequent than in the past also in relation to inappropriate dietary habits adopted in the western world. Nutraceuticals are currently investigated in order to prevent or retard the outcome of the so-called diet-related diseases, even including neurodegenerative pathologies. Here, we have in vitro studied the ability of fermented grape marc (FGM) from Negroamaro ( Read More

Although a large variety of pharmaceutical therapies for treating disease have been developed in recent years, there has been little progress in disease prevention. In particular, the protection of neural tissue is essential, because it is hardly regenerated. The use of nutraceuticals for maintaining the health has been supported by several clinical studies, including cross-sectional and interventional studies for age-related Read More

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a chronic neurodegenerative disorder and is the most common cause of progressive dementia in aging. Research on AD therapy has been partly successful in terms of developing symptomatic treatments, but there have been a number of failures with regard to developing disease-modifying therapies. The pathogenesis of AD remains unclear and the present one-drug, one-target paradigm for an Read More

α-Synuclein aggregation is centrally implicated in Parkinson's disease (PD). It involves multi-step nucleated polymerization process via the formation of dimers, soluble toxic oligomers and insoluble fibrils. In the present study, we synthesized a novel compound viz., Curcumin-glucoside (Curc-gluc), a modified form of curcumin and studied its anti-aggregating potential with α-synuclein. Under aggregating conditions in vitro, Curc-gluc Read More

An emerging role of IL-17 in the inflammatory response associated with pathogenesis of neurodegeneration has been recently suggested. However, though diet represents a key factor in the modulation of inflammatory processes, evidence is not currently available on the nutritional regulation of IL-17 in humans. In a double blind, randomized, placebo controlled, crossover study, we investigated the effect of High Fat Read More

Parkinson's disease (PD) is an age-associated neurodegenerative disease clinically characterized as a movement disorder. The motor symptoms in PD arise due to selective degeneration of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra of the ventral midbrain thereby depleting the dopamine levels in the striatum. Most of the current pharmacotherapeutic approaches in PD are aimed at replenishing the striatal dopamine. Altho Read More

Currently the long-term usage of traditional anti-HIV drugs, such as nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTIs), nonnucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NNRTIs) and protease inhibitors (PIs), eventually leads to the emergence of drug resistance and severe side effects. Thus it is imperative to design and develop more promising HIV-1 inhibitors to overcome these drawbacks. Fortunately, with the identification of Read More

In an attempt to resolve controversy regarding the causal contributions of mesolimbic dopamine (DA) systems to reward, we evaluate the three main competing explanatory categories: “liking,”“learning,” and “wanting” [1]. That is, DA may mediate (a) the hedonic impact of reward (liking), (b) learned predictions about rewarding effects (learning), or (c) the pursuit of rewards by attributing incentive salience to reward-relate Read More