Recent developments also emphasize the growing public health significance of neuropsychiatry, given the rapid increase in the number of patients living with the consequences of chronic brain disease such as stroke, traumatic brain injury (TBI), Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Parkinson’s disease (PD), epilepsy, multiple sclerosis (MS), and related conditions. Indeed, it has become clear that there is a high frequency of psychiatric symptoms in almost all neurologic diseases involving the central nervous system, such that the vast majority of Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical patients with neurologic

diseases will develop psychiatric disturbances ranging from affective disorders (eg, depression, mania) to cognitive impairments (eg, dementia, milder cognitive syndromes) to disturbances of Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical perception (eg, hallucinations, delusions) over the course of their illness. These disturbances typically run parallel to the classical neurologic symptoms

such as seizure, involuntary vocalization, motor weakness, sensory loss, or language disorder, and tend to cause disability and impair quality of life as much as, or even more than, the neurologic symptoms. While the underlying causes of brain disease are often difficult to treat, there is emerging evidence that the psychiatric symptoms of brain disease Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical are often amenable to treatment with existing therapies, both pharmacologic and nonpharmacologic. Since tens of millions of individuals now suffer from chronic neurologic disease, the publie health Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical importance of neuropsychiatry as a therapeutic area of psychiatry should be obvious. With the above in mind, approaching neuropsychiatry as an integrative field that teaches mechanistic aspects of brain-behavior relationships while being an active – and growing – clinical field

of great public health importance, this synthetic overview will attempt to provide a brief conceptual overview of what is known, and to make recommendations Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical regarding future directions. The disease paradigm Neuropsychiatry generally operates using the disease paradigm2 to explain the phenomena with Adenosine which it is PS-341 chemical structure concerned. As shown in Figure 1, this is a top-down approach, which begins by defining clinical signs, symptoms, and syndromes in mental state and behavior (otherwise known as “psychopathology”), linking them to an underlying pathology in the organ of interest, in this case, the brain, and then attempting to understand the etiology that brings about the pathology. Pathophysiology is the understanding of the how the clinical phenomena link mechanistically to the brain pathology In neuropsychiatry, pathophysiology is approached by carefully describing the clinical phenomena of interest and their relationship to the neurologic phenomena, and then linking these up to the location, type, and degree of the pathology.