Neurological disorders are a major public health concern. Notably, the rate of chronic neurological diseases is affected by lifestyle changes, leading to considerable health-care and economic burden worldwide. Considerable interest has emerged on functional foods due to their beneficial health efficacy. Thus, efforts have been made to extract different bioactive phytochemicals or compounds from therapeutic natural-based products, which has led to functional foods referred to as "vitafoods,""medifoods," "pharmafoods," or "medicinal foods." To overcome neurological illness such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), nutraceuticals have been applied as prophylactic options This review addresses nutraceutical intervention in the OCD treatment.
Mycotoxins pose a serious threat to global food safety, agricultural productivity, and public health. Food contamination with mycotoxins leads to physiological and biochemical abnormalities in humans and livestock. C. elegans, due to its unique characteristics, offers a dependable complementary model for elucidating the cellular and molecular basis of mycotoxin-mediated neurotoxicity and other general toxicological impacts. This chapter covers recent studies on mycotoxin toxicity in C. elegans, examining four classes of mycotoxins, namely aflatoxins (AFB1), fumonisins (FB1), deoxynivalenol (DON), and zearalenone (ZEA). Data in the literature reveal that mycotoxin exposure in C. elegans elicits oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, DNA damage, neurotoxicity, neuroendocrine alterations, and reproductive impairment. Specifically, FB1 promotes abnormal GABAergic and serotonergic neurotransmission, resulting in behavioral deficits in C. elegans. Mechanistic evidence reveals the central role of conserved transcription factors in stress-response and detoxification pathways, notably SKN-1/Nrf2 and DAF-16/FOXO signaling, in mediating mycotoxin toxicity. Collectively, this chapter highlights the utility of C. elegans in evaluating mycotoxin toxicity at environmentally relevant exposures. C. elegans represents an integrative and complementary model in understanding mechanisms associated with neurobehavioral toxicity resulting from mycotoxin exposure.
