Serotonin And Stroke

Patients with stroke frequently have mood and emotional disturbances that include depression, anxiety, emotional incontinence, and aggressiveness or anger proneness. There a great deal of evidence that serotonin dysfunction is an important pathophysiology of these poststroke mood and emotional disturbances. These symptoms are distressing for both the patients and their caregivers, and negatively influence the patients' quality of life. Serotonin enhancing drugs such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors are one of the most important therapeutic strategies. In this review, I will describe the most common poststroke mood and emotional disturbances. The phenomenology, related factors or predictors, and relevant lesion locations will be described, and pharmacological treatment of these emotional disturbances will be discussed based on presumable pathophysiological mechanisms with an emphasis of the role of serotonin. In the final part of this review, I will also briefly discuss the potential role of serotonin in the recovery of neurological dysfunction in stroke patients.