Excitotoxicity and Neurodegenerative Disorders

The excitatory amino acids (EAA) glutamate (Glu) and aspartate (Asp) are now recognized as key participants in a variety of physiologic and pathologic processes. On the one hand, these agents are likely to function as neurotransmitters at the majority of fast excitatory synapses in the vertebrate central nervous system (CNS), playing roles in normal synaptic transmission (Collingridge and Lester, 1989; Mayer and Westbrook, 1987a) and several forms of synaptic plasticity (Kuba and Kumamoto, 1990). Yet exposure of neurons to these agents clearly has toxic consequences, prompting hypotheses regarding the involvement of EAA in human neuro-degenerative syndromes (Olney, 1990). In this chapter we will review evidence linking EAA to specific neuropsychiatric syndromes. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.