Word: carlsson
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2000
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
That discovery alone merited a Nobel Prize, but Carlsson soon made another. For years, doctors prescribed drugs for schizophrenia with a kind of blind chemical faith; the medications reduced symptoms, but no one knew just how. In the 1960s, Carlsson discovered that they work by preventing nerve cells from taking up dopamine. That penetrating insight led directly to better antischizophrenia drugs...
...Nobel Prize committee reminded the world last week, that view radically changed in the late 1950s when Swedish pharmacologist Arvid Carlsson brought dopamine out of the shadows. First Carlsson established that the areas of the brain known as the basal ganglia contained very high levels of dopamine. Then he administered a drug that lowered those concentrations in laboratory mice. Soon the mice began to stagger and reel, losing control of their voluntary movements...
...Carlsson's mice, in other words, resembled human patients with Parkinson's disease--and L-dopa, the dopamine-boosting compound he used to restore normality to the mice, soon emerged as the frontline treatment for Parkinson...
Last week Carlsson, 77, a professor emeritus at Sweden's University of Gothenburg, finally won a Nobel. Sharing the prize for Physiology or Medicine with him were Columbia University's Eric Kandel, 70, who laid bare the molecular foundations of learning and memory, and Rockefeller University's Paul Greengard, 74, who elucidated the chemical cascade touched off by dopamine and other neurotransmitters. In each case, the Nobel was surely long overdue and richly deserved...
...WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE REST OF US: When nerves in the brain can't communicate with one another, physical as well as psychiatric problems can arise. Carlsson and Greengard were instrumental in identifying the role of dopamine (a key brain chemical) as a transmitter, a discovery that has led to new treatments for Parkinson's and schizophrenia. Kandel's research showed that changing the speed of inner-brain transmissions can have profound effects on both short- and long-term memory...