This volume provides a comprehensive reference on drugs employed to treat Parkinson's disease. Since pharmacology is dependent upon physiology, and physiology upon anatomy, the multiauthored contents build up from all these disciplines to applied therapeutics. Our knowledge of synaptic mechanisms in the striatum is reviewed; and drugs are considered as therapeutic tools to manipulate synaptic function. Methods of evaluating treatment in Parkinson's disease are discussed in order to provide a background against which the reader can determine whether therapeutic studies are meaningful. The...

In 1991, a small annual meeting named "International Winter Conference on Neurodegeneration (lWCN)" was established; the aim of this meeting is to review the neurodegenerative disorders and to attempt to explore how progress might be made in this field, as the neurodegenerative disorders have been emerging to be one of the major causes of morbidity and mortality in modern societies. The first meeting took place in Seefeld, Austria, in February 1992; the topics for the first IWCN were chosen to provide a broad foundation of clinical science, which included the problem of aging, classification...