Dietary supplement Glucosamine may have a role in reducing excitability in brain cells

In an article published in the Journal of Neuroscience Prof. John Chatham, of the Department of Pathology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and colleagues report that increasing O-GlcNAcylation levels in brain cells using the dietary supplement "glucosamine" widely used as a supplement to help reduce pain in osteoarthritis and other conditions was found to reduce reduce neural excitability in rodents.

The researchers had in a previous study shown that increases in protein O-GlcNAcylation are associated with a reduction in the strength of synapses in the hippocampus of the brain. This synaptic dampening effect on glutamatergic networks suggests that increasing O-GlcNAcylation will depress pathological hyperexcitability. Using in vitroand in vivo models of epileptiform activity, they have shown in the current study that acutely increasing O-GlcNAc levels can significantly attenuate ongoing epileptiform activity and prophylactically dampen subsequent seizure activity.

They tested this hypothesis using glucosamine which blocks an enzyme that clears O-GlcNAcylation from the brain, leading to a rapid increase in levels of the protein. Glucosamine was applied to hippocampal brain slices derived from rats and mice in which epileptiform activity was generated by GABA_AR inhibition using drugs. The drug induced neural excitability was found to be dampened with ten minutes of the application of the compound glucosamine.

This is an exciting finding representing another target for research in epilepsy therapeutics.

Stewart LT, Khan AU, Wang K, Pizarro D, Pati S, Buckingham SC et al. (2017) Acute Increases in Protein O-GlcNAcylation Dampen Epileptiform Activity in Hippocampus.J Neurosci 37 (34):8207-8215. DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0173-16.2017 PMID: 28760863.