Mitochondrial function and inflammation pathways in the neuroprogression of mental disorders

2019 ◽  
pp. 35-62
Author(s):  
Ana C. Andreazza ◽  
Rajas P. Kale ◽  
Angela Duong ◽  
Fabio Molina ◽  
Susannah J. Tye
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Mental Disorders ◽  
Mitochondrial Function ◽  
Cellular Mechanisms ◽  
Cellular Debris ◽  
Efficient Communication ◽  
Increase Risk ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Over Time

Stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, and inflammation are key pathophysiological processes contributing to neuroprogression in mental illness. These factors independently and collectively impact critical cellular mechanisms essential for healthy brain development and function. As these damaging processes continue, cellular debris (damaged DNA and proteins) accumulates, and neuronal integrity is impaired. In addition to this, the myelin sheath that encapsulates neurones to enable smooth and efficient communication throughout the brain is impaired. This chapter outlines how these factors are impacted by stress, inflammation, and mitochondrial function and how they work independently, and together, to increase risk for the development of mental illness, as well as to promote neuroprogression of the illness over time. We discuss how targeting these pathophysiological processes through interdependent factors such as the NLRP3 inflammasome, which sits at the intersection of these mechanistic pathways, may unlock opportunities to limit neuroprogression in the future.

Mental illness: The collision of meaning with mechanism

2020 ◽  
pp. 263-289
Author(s):  
Steven E. Hyman ◽  
Doug McConnell
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Gene Regulation ◽  
Human Brain ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Clinical Encounter ◽  
Structure And Function ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
And Function ◽  
Human Brains ◽  
The Brain

‘Mental illness: the collision of meaning with mechanism’ is based on the views of psychiatry that Steven Hyman articulated in his Loebel Lectures—mental illness results from the disordered functioning of the human brain and effective treatment repairs or mitigates those malfunctions. This view is not intended as reductionist as causes of mental illness and contributions to their repair may come from any source that affects the structure and function of the brain. These might include social interactions and other sources of lived experience, ideas (such as those learned in cognitive therapy), gene sequences and gene regulation, metabolic factors, drugs, electrodes, and so on. This, however, is not the whole story for psychiatry on Hyman’s view; interpersonal interactions between clinicians and patients, intuitively understood in such folk psychological terms as selfhood, intention, and agency are also critical for successful practice. As human beings who are suffering, patients seek to make sense of their lives and benefit from the empathy, respect, and a sense of being understood not only as the objects of a clinical encounter, but also as subjects. Hyman’s argument, however, is that the mechanisms by which human brains function and malfunction to produce the symptoms and impairments of mental illness are opaque to introspection and that the mechanistic understandings necessary for diagnosis and treatment are incommensurate with intuitive (folk psychological) human self-understanding. Thus, psychiatry does best when skillful clinicians switch between an objectifying medical and neurobiological stance and the interpersonal stance in which the clinician engages the patients as a subject. Attempts to integrate these incommensurate views of patients and their predicaments have historically produced incoherent explanations of psychopathology and have often led treatment astray. For example, privileging of folk psychological testimony, even when filtered through sophisticated theories has historically led psychiatry into intellectually blind and clinically ineffective cul-de-sacs such as psychoanalysis.

Global Burden of Mental Disorders

2017 ◽  
pp. 164-186
Author(s):  
Meghamala S. Tavaragi ◽  
Sushma C.
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Mental Disorders ◽  
Health Professionals ◽  
Help Seeking ◽  
Disease Burden ◽  
Economic Loss ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
Public Health Professionals ◽  
Increase Risk

Mental disorders are an important cause of long-term disability and dependency. It accounts for over 15% of the disease burden in developed countries, which is more than the disease burden caused by all cancers. Mental illness is a leading cause of suffering, economic loss and social problems. The burden of mental disorders is likely to have been underestimated because of inadequate appreciation of the connectedness between mental illness and other health conditions. Mental disorders increase risk for communicable and non-communicable diseases, and contribute to unintentional and intentional injury, and comorbidity complicates help-seeking, diagnosis, and treatment, and influences prognosis. Consequently, health professionals have trivialized the issue of mental illness. It is essential that researchers and public health professionals work together to resolve the enormous public health crisis presented by mental disorders. In short, we must “mainstream” mental health.

‘They accused me of strangling her’: epilepsy and violence debate in Croatia at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 460-472
Author(s):  
Martin Kuhar ◽  
Stella Fatović-Ferenčić
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Mental Disorders ◽  
Forensic Psychiatry ◽  
Biological Theory ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Pharmaceutical Companies ◽  
Violent Behaviour ◽  
Theory Of Crime ◽  
The Brain

Nineteenth-century psychiatry shifted its focus to the brain as the seat of mental disorders. With a new understanding of mental disorders arose the need to consult forensic psychiatrists in cases of criminal acts committed by persons with mental illness. This article focuses on three murders committed by ‘epileptics’ at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries in Croatia. An analysis of these cases will help to situate forensic psychiatry at the turn of the century within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and reveal the authority that forensic experts wielded in the courts. We will argue that Cesare Lombroso’s biological theory of crime, as well as the influence of eugenicists and pharmaceutical companies, shaped the long-standing relationship between epilepsy and violent behaviour.

Images of the Brain in Psychiatry

1986 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 122-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Gordon ◽  
C. Kraiuhin ◽  
R. A. Meares
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Psychiatric Disorders ◽  
Brain Structure ◽  
Structure And Function ◽  
Brain Structure And Function ◽  
Computer Based ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
And Function ◽  
Rcbf Spect ◽  
The Brain

In psychiatry, the use of computer-based techniques for constructing images of the brain is relatively recent. Nevertheless, findings that have resulted from their use thus far might provide us with a new perspective in the understanding of mental illness. They raise the possibility that many of the disorders, previously understood primarily in terms of psychosocial factors, are associated with specific abnormalities of brain structure and/or function. Although terms such as NMR, BEAM, RCBF, SPECT and PET are increasingly found in medical and psychiatric journals, few people understand in simple terms the principles on which these techniques are based. In this article the techniques used for constructing images of brain structure and function are explained, and an overview of the findings in psychiatric disorders is presented.

scholarly journals A Window into the Brain: Advances in Psychiatric fMRI

2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoyan Zhan ◽  
Rongjun Yu
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Brain Network ◽  
Psychiatric Research ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Functional Communication ◽  
Spatial And Temporal Patterns ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Brain Structure And Function ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Brain

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) plays a key role in modern psychiatric research. It provides a means to assay differences in brain systems that underlie psychiatric illness, treatment response, and properties of brain structure and function that convey risk factor for mental diseases. Here we review recent advances in fMRI methods in general use and progress made in understanding the neural basis of mental illness. Drawing on concepts and findings from psychiatric fMRI, we propose that mental illness may not be associated with abnormalities in specific local regions but rather corresponds to variation in the overall organization of functional communication throughout the brain network. Future research may need to integrate neuroimaging information drawn from different analysis methods and delineate spatial and temporal patterns of brain responses that are specific to certain types of psychiatric disorders.

scholarly journals ON MENTAL ILLNESS AND BROKEN BRAINS

Think ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (58) ◽  
pp. 103-112
Author(s):  
Anneli Jefferson
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Mental Disorders ◽  
Brain Cancer ◽  
World View ◽  
Brain Diseases ◽  
Brain Disorders ◽  
Empirical Question ◽  
The Brain

ABSTRACTWe often hear that certain mental disorders are disorders of the brain, but it is not clear what this claim amounts to. Does it mean that they are like classic brain diseases such as brain cancer? I argue that this is not the case for most mental disorders. Neither does the claim that all mental disorders are brain disorders follow from a materialist world-view. The only plausible way of understanding mental disorders as brain disorders is a fairly modest one, where we label brain differences we find in mental illness as pathological based on their link to mental dysfunction. How many mental disorders will turn out to be brain disorders on this understanding is an empirical question.

scholarly journals The volume of changes in the cells of the brain under the influence of carbon monoxide poisoning

2020 ◽  
Vol VII (4) ◽  
pp. 198-242
Author(s):  
I. Spirtov
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Carbon Monoxide ◽  
Nervous System ◽  
Mental Disorders ◽  
Carbon Monoxide Poisoning ◽  
Sense Organ ◽  
Healthy People ◽  
Extensive Literature ◽  
Post Mortem ◽  
The Brain

The effect of carbon monoxide on the nervous system, obvious and in everyday, not particularly severe cases of poisoning with this gas, is illustrated by the extensive literature, growing from year to year, of cases where, after poisoning with carbon monoxide, severe pathological phenomena from the nervous system developed; At the same time, in one number of cases, such phenomena constituted a direct continuation of the poisoning, in other cases they developed after the first aftermath of poisoning passed and proceeded more or less prolonged, so to speak, a light difference, during which the subjects were poisoned, who were not healthy people in all relations. These post-mortem pathological phenomena capture both the intellectual sphere, as well as the motor and sensitive areas, namely, they were observed: ammesia, aphasia, stupor, dementia, further: general agitation, mental illness, similar to primary mental disorders and contractions, weakening of the sensitivity of one or another sense organ.

scholarly journals Untangling the two-way signalling route from synapses to the nucleus, and from the nucleus back to the synapses

2014 ◽  
Vol 369 (1633) ◽  
pp. 20130150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mio Nonaka ◽  
Hajime Fujii ◽  
Ryang Kim ◽  
Takashi Kawashima ◽  
Hiroyuki Okuno ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Hippocampal Neurons ◽  
Synaptic Weight ◽  
External Environment ◽  
Synaptic Activity ◽  
Early Gene ◽  
Cellular Mechanisms ◽  
Brain Areas ◽  
Neuronal Soma ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Over Time

During learning and memory, it has been suggested that the coordinated electrical activity of hippocampal neurons translates information about the external environment into internal neuronal representations, which then are stored initially within the hippocampus and subsequently into other areas of the brain. A widely held hypothesis posits that synaptic plasticity is a key feature that critically modulates the triggering and the maintenance of such representations, some of which are thought to persist over time as traces or tags. However, the molecular and cell biological basis for these traces and tags has remained elusive. Here, we review recent findings that help clarify some of the molecular and cellular mechanisms critical for these events, by untangling a two-way signalling crosstalk route between the synapses and the neuronal soma. In particular, a detailed interrogation of the soma-to-synapse delivery of immediate early gene product Arc/Arg3.1, whose induction is triggered by heightened synaptic activity in many brain areas, teases apart an unsuspected ‘inverse’ synaptic tagging mechanism that likely contributes to maintaining the contrast of synaptic weight between strengthened and weak synapses within an active ensemble.

scholarly journals Sequence heterochrony led to a gain of functionality in an immature stage of the central complex: A fly–beetle insight

PLoS Biology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (10) ◽  
pp. e3000881
Author(s):  
Max S. Farnworth ◽  
Kolja N. Eckermann ◽  
Gregor Bucher
Keyword(s):  
Adult Life ◽  
Immature Stage ◽  
Central Complex ◽  
Neural Cells ◽  
Life Stages ◽  
Cellular Mechanisms ◽  
Brain Structure And Function ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Sequence Heterochrony

Animal behavior is guided by the brain. Therefore, adaptations of brain structure and function are essential for animal survival, and each species differs in such adaptations. The brain of one individual may even differ between life stages, for instance, as adaptation to the divergent needs of larval and adult life of holometabolous insects. All such differences emerge during development, but the cellular mechanisms behind the diversification of brains between taxa and life stages remain enigmatic. In this study, we investigated holometabolous insects in which larvae differ dramatically from the adult in both behavior and morphology. As a consequence, the central complex, mainly responsible for spatial orientation, is conserved between species at the adult stage but differs between larvae and adults of one species as well as between larvae of different taxa. We used genome editing and established transgenic lines to visualize cells expressing the conserved transcription factor retinal homeobox, thereby marking homologous genetic neural lineages in both the fly Drosophila melanogaster and the beetle Tribolium castaneum. This approach allowed us for the first time to compare the development of homologous neural cells between taxa from embryo to the adult. We found complex heterochronic changes including shifts of developmental events between embryonic and pupal stages. Further, we provide, to our knowledge, the first example of sequence heterochrony in brain development, where certain developmental steps changed their position within the ontogenetic progression. We show that through this sequence heterochrony, an immature developmental stage of the central complex gains functionality in Tribolium larvae.

Global Burden of Mental Disorders

2019 ◽  
pp. 445-467
Author(s):  
Meghamala S. Tavaragi ◽  
Sushma C.
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Mental Disorders ◽  
Health Professionals ◽  
Help Seeking ◽  
Disease Burden ◽  
Economic Loss ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
Public Health Professionals ◽  
Increase Risk

Mental disorders are an important cause of long-term disability and dependency. It accounts for over 15% of the disease burden in developed countries, which is more than the disease burden caused by all cancers. Mental illness is a leading cause of suffering, economic loss and social problems. The burden of mental disorders is likely to have been underestimated because of inadequate appreciation of the connectedness between mental illness and other health conditions. Mental disorders increase risk for communicable and non-communicable diseases, and contribute to unintentional and intentional injury, and comorbidity complicates help-seeking, diagnosis, and treatment, and influences prognosis. Consequently, health professionals have trivialized the issue of mental illness. It is essential that researchers and public health professionals work together to resolve the enormous public health crisis presented by mental disorders. In short, we must “mainstream” mental health.

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