Dietary Phenylalanine and Brain Function

This volume contains the manuscripts of the full papers and posters pre- sented at the conference "Dietary Phenylalanine and Brain Function," which took place at the Park Hyatt Hotel, Washington, D.C., on May 8-10, 1987. The conference was organized by a committee that included Drs. Louis Elsas (Emory University, Atlanta), William Pardridge (UCLA), Timothy Maher (Massachusetts College of Pharmacy), Donald Schomer (Harvard), and Richard Wurtman (MIT). It was sponsored by the Center for Brain Sciences and Metabolism Charitable Trust, a foun- dation which, during the past few years, had also organized seven other conferences related to interactions between circulating compounds (drugs, nutrients, hormones, toxins) and brain function. The Center's most recent other conferences were on "Melatonin in Humans" (Vienna, Austria; November 1985) and "The Pharmacology of Memory Disorders Associ- ated with Aging" (Zurich, Switzerland; January 1987). The decision to organize this conference was based on the perception that major changes had recently occurred in society's uses of phenylalanine and phenylalanine-containing products, and on the belief that a meeting of scientists and physicians who work on the amino acid's neurological effects could both catalyze additional research on these effects and assist regula- tory bodies in formulating appropriate public policies relating to the use of these products: phenylalanine, in both its L- and D-forms, has apparently become a popular sales item at "health-food" stores, and thus is now being consumed by a fairly large number of people, in the absence of the other