Acetylcholine, Histamine, and Cognition: Two Sides of the Same Coin
- Patrizio Blandina1,
- Marcel Efoudebe,
- Gabriele Cenni,
- Pierfrancesco Mannaioni, and
- Maria Beatrice Passani
- Dipartimento di Farmacologia Preclinica e Clinica, V.le G. Pieraccini 6, Universitá di Firenze, 50139 Firenze, Italy
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
The forebrain cholinergic neurons are localized in the nucleus basalis magnocellularis (NBM), the major source of cholinergic innervation to the neocortex and to the amygdala, and in the medium septum-banda diagonalis complex, which provides cholinergic inputs to the hippocampus (Mesulam et al. 1983; Woolf et al. 1984; Nicoll 1985). Basic and clinical studies have linked dysfunctions of these neurons to cognitive decline (Everitt and Robbins 1997; Givens and Sarter 1997). Their extensive loss is characteristic of the forebrain of Alzheimer's disease patients (Davies and Maloney 1976; Coyle et al. 1983; Kuhl et al. 1999), and anticholinergic drugs, such as scopolamine and atropine, produce learning and memory deficits in a variety of cognitive animal models (Deutsch 1971; Bartus and Johnson 1976; Ennaceur and Meliani 1992), and affect recognition memory in humans (Sperling et al. 2002; Sherman et al. 2003). Moreover, aged rodents display both cognitive …
