Involvement of dopamine D2 and glutamate NMDA receptors in the antidepressant-like effect of amantadine in mice

Myoclonus Secondary to Amantadine: Case Report and Literature Review

The usual adverse events of amantadine are dizziness, dry mouth, and peripheral edema. Postmarketing experience has revealed abnormal movements such as tremors, involuntary muscle contractions, and gait abnormalities. Herein, we report a case of an elderly male who presented with generalized twitching associated with amantadine. A 64-year-old male presenting with jerking movements within one day of onset was admitted. Sudden and involuntary distal lower and upper limb muscle twitching was observed. The subject presented subsequent brief movements when attempting to stand or hold arms antigravity. He was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease three years ago. Eight days before the presentation to the emergency department, he consulted with his primary care physician, who prescribed amantadine to improve his motor symptoms. On the seventh day, he developed brisk abnormal movements. Laboratory exams, neuroimaging, and electroencephalogram were unremarkable. Amantadine was discontinued. After three days, the patient reported that his jerking movements had fully recovered. To the authors' knowledge, 22 individuals with amantadine-associated myoclonus had already been reported in the literature. The pathophysiology of amantadine-induced myoclonus is probably related to serotoninergic pathways. Myoclonus secondary to amantadine was slightly more common in men. The population affected was elderly, with a mean and median age of 67.7 and 64 years.

Small compound-based direct cell conversion with combinatorial optimization of pathway regulations

MOTIVATION

Direct cell conversion, direct reprogramming (DR), is an innovative technology that directly converts source cells to target cells without bypassing induced pluripotent stem cells. The use of small compounds (e.g. drugs) for DR can help avoid carcinogenic risk induced by gene transfection; however, experimentally identifying small compounds remains challenging because of combinatorial explosion.

RESULTS

In this article, we present a new computational method, COMPRENDRE (combinatorial optimization of pathway regulations for direct reprograming), to elucidate the mechanism of small compound-based DR and predict new combinations of small compounds for DR. We estimated the potential target proteins of DR-inducing small compounds and identified a set of target pathways involving DR. We identified multiple DR-related pathways that have not previously been reported to induce neurons or cardiomyocytes from fibroblasts. To overcome the problem of combinatorial explosion, we developed a variant of a simulated annealing algorithm to identify the best set of compounds that can regulate DR-related pathways. Consequently, the proposed method enabled to predict new DR-inducing candidate combinations with fewer compounds and to successfully reproduce experimentally verified compounds inducing the direct conversion from fibroblasts to neurons or cardiomyocytes. The proposed method is expected to be useful for practical applications in regenerative medicine.

AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION

The code supporting the current study is available at the http://labo.bio.kyutech.ac.jp/~yamani/comprendre.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Comparative Analysis of Dopaminergic and Cholinergic Mechanisms of Sensory and Sensorimotor Gating in Healthy Individuals and in Patients With Schizophrenia

Sensory and sensorimotor gating provide the early processing of information under conditions of rapid presentation of multiple stimuli. Gating deficiency is observed in various psychopathologies, in particular, in schizophrenia. However, there is also a significant proportion of people in the general population with low filtration rates who do not show any noticeable cognitive decline. The review article presents a comparative analysis of existing data on the peculiarities of cholinergic and dopaminergic mechanisms associated with lowering gating in healthy individuals and in patients with schizophrenia. The differences in gating mechanisms in cohorts of healthy individuals and those with schizophrenia are discussed.