Microdialysis for Neurochemical Monitoring of the Human Brain

Microdialysis (MD) was introduced in the 1970s (1,2).The basic idea was to ' introduce an artificial blood capillary into brain tissue to allow sampling of molecules, e.g.neurotransmitters.MD has become a widely used method for chemical sampling from the neuronal microenvironment, i.e. the interstitial fluid, of the brain and other organs.Over 7400 publications have been published with this technique in basic science.MD was introduced as a clinical research tool in internal medicine in 1989 (3,4) and in neurosurgery in 1990 (5,6).Today, MD is a widely used clinical sampling method, as evidenced by the number of publications (Table I).The purpose of this short review is to provide the authors' view on the current status of MD applications in clinical neuroscience.For more comprehensive reviews see Landolt & Langemann (7), Hamani et at.(8), Ungerstedt & Nordstrom (9), and Hillered & Persson (10).