ABSTRACT

This chapter describes some of the animal models commonly used to study relevant brain disorders, all of them essentials to solve one of the major problems in the treatment of these diseases which is crossing the blood-brain barrier. It explains some relevant imaging techniques for the use of nanoparticles in diagnosis and treatment focusing on the use of bioluminescence to monitor brain tumour growth. Neurological disorders involve damage to the central nervous system (CNS). Mice are one of the most commonly used animal models for the study of neurological diseases, they present several advantages including that genetic manipulation can be routinely carried out in the mouse genome. Neurodegenerative Diseases (NDs) represent a large group of neurological disorders with heterogeneous clinical and pathological expressions affecting specific subsets of neurons in specific functional anatomic systems. ND models should reproduce the clinical manifestations characteristic of a specific disorder or the loss of specific neural populations.