Depression is among the most prevalent forms of mental illness and a major cause of morbidity worldwide. Diagnosis of depression is mainly based on symptomatic criteria, and the heterogeneity of the disease suggests that multiple different biological mechanisms may underlie its etio ...

Animal models and preclinical tests have played large roles in the development of antidepressant drugs and are likely to continue to play important roles. In the present communication, the main animal models of depression have been described and reviewed. These models include the Flinde ...

The water maze task can be used to assess sensory motor and cognitive function in rodents. When properly employed, this task can behaviorally assess acquisition of a spatial search strategy, as well as working and reference memory. The following section uses research on age-related, cogniti ...

Traditional models of neuropsychiatric disorders consist of attempts to replicate the broad spectrum of behavioural and neurochemical sequelae that characterize a specific disorder. However, these disorders comprise complex constellations of symptoms, including emo ...

Alcoholism is a chronic treatment-resistant disorder typically presenting with recurrent/cyclic periods of abusive drinking, withdrawal, abstinence, and relapse. Various strategies that attempt to model these processes in animals have been developed to elucidate the beha ...

Developments in behavioral assessment, autonomic and/or baseline reactivity, psychopharmacology, and genetics, have contributed significantly to the assessment of performance-enhancing drugs in animal models. Particular classes of steroid hormones: androgenic st ...

Animals housed with running wheels and subjected to daily food restriction show paradoxical reductions in food intake and increases in running wheel activity. This phenomenon, known as activity-based anorexia (ABA), leads to marked reductions in body weight that can ultimately lead to ...

Obesity has become a major health and economic burden, and the development of new treatments is urgently needed. Initially, such treatments involve use of animal models, and the purpose of this chapter is to describe some of the most useful models, why one might be chosen over another to address a parti ...

Binge eating is a behavior that occurs in some eating disorders, as well as in obesity and in nonclinical populations. Both sugars and fats are readily consumed by human beings and are common components of binges. This chapter describes animal models of sugar and fat bingeing, which allow for a detail ...

The classification of psychiatric disorders has always been a problem in clinical settings. The present debate about the major systems in clinical practice, DSM-IV and ICD-10, has resulted in attempts to improve and replace those schemes by some that include more endophenotypic and molec ...

Mathematical sciences and computational methods have found new applications in fields like medicine over the last few decades. Modern data acquisition and data analysis protocols have been of great assistance to medical researchers and clinical scientists. Especially in psychi ...

The compartmented culture model utilizing rat sympathetic neurons and sensory neurons is gaining wide use in investigations of neurotrophic factor signaling and axonal transport. Previous chapters have focused on the preparation of compartmented cultures. Here we focus on anal ...

Glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH; EC 1.2. 1.12) has classically been regarded as an ubiquitous enzyme of little importance beyond its role in glycolysis. Indeed, the most frequent reference to GAPDH in recent scientific literature is as the “housekeeping” gene used to s ...

The use of DNA arrays offers the promise of semiquantitative analysis of large numbers of genes simultaneously. Here, we report our efforts at applying this technology to an issue of potentially high relevance to current research in Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). The AD field is in strong need of bioma ...

Microarray technology, while it is no longer in its infancy, is still immature and unpredictable. If it works well, microarray expression analysis is a powerful method for estimating the behavior of 10,000 genes simultaneously. But how often does it work well? Because of the rapid adoption of this ...

To manage the instrument successfully, delicacy of touch and a great deal of patience are required; but it is only with the latter, combined with perseverance, energy, and close observations that scientific facts have, or ever will be established.

Specific cellular and temporal regulation of gene expression is a goal of many molecular studies. The study of programmed cell death requires cellular specificity, temporal regulation, as well as the interaction of a myriad of gene products. One way to regulate these interactions in an apopt ...

Apoptosis is a physiological process that contributes to the establishment and homeostasis of the nervous system. For example, neurons that fail to make the proper connections with their postsynaptic targets die naturally during development due to the lack of sufficient trophic supp ...

In recent years substantial evidence has accumulated demonstrating a central regulatory role for mitochondria in cell death (1). More recently, mechanisms of cell death, through apoptosis, have been elucidated and increasingly point toward mitochondria as the gatekeepers of apo ...

Bax is a proapoptotic member of the Bcl-2 family. Members of this family can promote either cell survival, as in the case of Bcl-2 and Bcl-XL, or cell death, as in the case of Bax and Bak. Bax was first identified as a Bcl-2 binding partner by immunoprecipitation (1). Subsequently it was shown that overexpression ...