Neuropharmacologic Approaches to Cognitive Rehabilitation

Neuropharmacologic rehabilitation of cognitive deficits is a field waiting to be created. NIH, with its Roadmap Initiative for Translational Research, is pushing hard, but clinicians and scientists, for the most part, have yet to accept the challenge. The goal of this Special Issue is to document the current state of the art. As readers will note, most contributors conclude the field is just now taking its tentative first steps toward self-definition. Our aim in this Special Issue is to present a survey of the latest developments in pharmacologic treatment of cognitive deficit in selected clinical disorders,including the dementias, Parkinson’s disease (PD), multiple sclerosis (MS), epilepsy, vascular disorders and traumatic brain injury (TBI). Our primary interest was to consider not only treatment of acute or subacute disease, but also approaches to prevention and rehabilitation. Two principal conclusions emerge from these detailed reviews: 1) cognitive disorders associated with each of these neurologic conditions can be severe and disabling; 2) effective pharmacologic intervention for some of these disabling cognitive symptoms are now emerging, but are understudied. The first three papers discuss disorders (dementias, vascular disorders and TBI) that share a long tradition of research into cognitive deficits. Thus, studies of pharmacologic management of cognitive disturbances in these disorders are considerably more advanced than