Word: schizophrenia
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...breeding ground for psychiatric problems. Poor eating habits, irregular sleeping patterns and experimentation with drugs and alcohol - especially combined with the academic stress of college life - may all play roles in triggering mental problems. Additionally, many of the major psychiatric illnesses, including depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, often do not manifest themselves until the late teens or early...
That discovery alone merited a Nobel Prize, but Carlsson soon made another. For years, doctors prescribed drugs for schizophrenia with a kind of blind chemical faith; the medications reduced symptoms, but no one knew just how. In the 1960s, Carlsson discovered that they work by preventing nerve cells from taking up dopamine. That penetrating insight led directly to better antischizophrenia drugs...
...neurotransmitter dopamine ranks among the most powerful of the brain's master molecules. A regulator of mood and movement, it plays a principal role in Parkinson's disease, drug addiction and schizophrenia. For years after its discovery in 1910, however, scientists considered dopamine merely a stepping-stone to the more powerful compound noradrenaline...
...When nerves in the brain can't communicate with one another, physical as well as psychiatric problems can arise. Carlsson and Greengard were instrumental in identifying the role of dopamine (a key brain chemical) as a transmitter, a discovery that has led to new treatments for Parkinson's and schizophrenia. Kandel's research showed that changing the speed of inner-brain transmissions can have profound effects on both short- and long-term memory...
...haven't found a simple answer to this question, but I have come upon some satisfaction in the discovery that the field of neurogenetics is not as pat as I had feared. BPAD and schizophrenia are both marked by multifactorial genetic inheritance; they are not the results of basic Mendelian transmission. This means that there is a whole host of genes that is involved in the development of either disorder. What lends neurogenetics its literally mind-boggling puzzles are questions addressing possible interactions of these genes: Do the additive effects of a number of genes create the phenotypic spectrum...