About this Research Topic

Background

Stroke, Alzheimer's disease (AD), and depression are among the most common neurological and psychiatric disorders with unmet treatment needs. These seemingly distinct diseases share some common cellular and molecular processes, such as synaptic plasticity impairments, a lack of neurotrophins, functional neuron loss, and inflammation. Cognitive impairments are shared in these three diseases: about 35% of AD patients exhibit depressive-like behaviors; post-stroke depression affects 18 to 33 percent of patients and is underdiagnosed. Therefore, this special issue will mainly collect papers researching these three diseases.

The COVID-19 pandemic increased the global incidence of major depressive disorder by 27.6%. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) were the first-line treatment for major depressive disorder. Citalopram is one of the first-line antidepressant medications. It has the potential to cause sexual and gastrointestinal side effects, which impedes its clinical application.
Stroke is one of the leading causes of death and disability in the world. Thrombectomy and tissue plasminogen activators (t-PA) are the only FDA-approved treatments for ischemic stroke patients, but they have a short time window and an elevated risk of hemorrhagic transformation.
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common neurodegenerative disease in elderly people. The current treatments included cholinesterase inhibitors and N-methyl d-aspartate (NMDA) antagonists. However, AD can not be cured by these drugs.
Natural products show great potential to treat these neurological diseases with few side effects. It is critical to continue developing novel active compounds and the corresponding therapeutic targets to treat these disorders.

This Research Topic aims to identify the active compounds from natural products for the treatment of neurological diseases and explore the corresponding novel therapeutic targets of these compounds. The development of bioactivity-guided fractionation is useful for discovering new active compounds, and application of Omics technique accelerates the discovery of novel therapeutic targets.
We welcome the submission of original research papers and review articles, including but not limited to the following topics:
1. The identification of new active compounds and their possible mechanisms in treating neurological diseases, particularly depression, stroke and Alzheimer's disease.
2. The application of Omics to uncover the novel therapeutic targets of natural products, which shows the bioactivity for treating neurological diseases, particularly depression, stroke, and Alzheimer's disease.

In addition, for manuscripts dealing with plant extracts or other natural substances/compounds, the composition and the stability of the study material must be described in sufficient detail. In particular, for extracts, chromatograms with the characterization of the dominating compound(s) are requested. The level of purity must be proven and included.

Keywords: Natural products, Neurological diseases, Stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, Depression, Therapeutic targets

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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