Mental disorders have a marked social impact. For the last 100 years, psychiatry has been trying to be a field of medicine based on cellular pathology, even amid difficulties, and the neuropathological basis of psychiatric disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease, progressive paralysis, and narcolepsy, has been clarified. In current psychiatry, there is divergence between pragmatic science, such as clinical trials based on operational diagnoses of mental disorders, and mechanistic science such as the elucidation of causes of the mental disorders based on neuroscience and other methods. To overcome this situation and help elucidate the causes of mental disorders, it is necessary to promote mutual collaboration between basic and clinical sciences, making full use of animal models, iPS cells, post-mortem brains, and data-driven research. The advancement of research on the causes of psychiatric disorders is expected to enable biological diagnosis based on brain imaging and genome analysis.
Author's abstract
Aiming at Conquering Mental Disorders: Past and Future
Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Science, Juntendo University Graduate School of Medicine
Psychiatria et Neurologia Japonica
124: 392-396, 2022
<Keywords:genome, brain imaging, animal models, data-driven research, neural circuits>