Catecholamines and Neurologic Diseases

Nature has been unusually kind to research scientists who work with the catecholamines: it has endowed their work with instant relevance. In few other areas of biomedical science has it been possible to achieve so rapid a translation of basic biochemistry into practical therapy.For at least a decade, studies about the synthesis and metabolism of norepinephrine in laboratory animals have yielded enough information to allow biochemists and pharmacologists to invent chemical structures that should and do act on "noradrenergic neurons" in the human brain and sympathetic nervous system to elevate or depress mood or blood pressure.1 The results of . . .