“…PEA is endowed with antiallergic, anti-inflammatory, and antinociceptive properties (Calignano et al, 1998) and may elicit a wide range of in vivo effects that includes analgesia, inhibition of food intake, reduction of gastrointestinal motility, inhibition of cancer cell proliferation, and cytoprotection (Lambert and Di Marzo, 1999). Under physiological conditions, PEA is present at high concentrations in the central nervous system (Cadas et al, 1997), where its concentrations significantly increase under pathological conditions, like brain ischemia (Franklin et al, 2003;Berger et al, 2004), excitotoxicity (Di Marzo et al, 1994;Hansen et al, 1995), and neuroinflammation (Darmani et al, 2005). In vitro and in vivo experiments suggest that PEA has neuroprotective activity; it protects cerebellar granule neurons against excitotoxicity (Skaper et al, 1996), inhibits electroshock-and chemically induced seizures in mice (Sheerin et al, 2004), and enhances microglial cell motility (Franklin et al, 2003).…”