Fri. Oct 11, 2019 8:40 AM - 10:20 AM Room 16 (Heian)

Organizer / Chair: Shinya KASAI (Addictive Substance Project, Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science, Japan), Co-chair: Shuji IRITANI (Department of Psychiatry, Graduate School of Medical Science, Nagoya University, Japan), Discussants: ‌Shigeki YAMAGUCHI (Department of Anesthesia and Pain Medicine, Dokkyo Medical University, Japan), Hiroki TANAKA (Department of Legal Medicine, Asahikawa Medical University, Japan)

Psychiatric disorders are largely multi-factorial conditions, and the identification of both genetic and environmental factors are important to better understand their pathophysiology and to develop improved treatment strategies. In particular, the impact of various environmental factors that influence the individual during early development, childhood, youth and adulthood, and their relative importance for the development and course of each specific psychiatric disorder is important to assess.
Animal experiments allow for studies of affected brain regions with many methods that cannot be applied on living human subjects. From such experiments, we can learn detailed pathophysiological pathways of disease, but it may be difficult to translate these findings to the clinical setting. In contrast to several somatic diseases, where biochemical tests can show the similarities with the corresponding human conditions, the animal models of psychiatric diseases such as depression suffer from gold standard markers of disease to prove the model´s resemblance of the same condition in humans.
Non-invasive visualization approaches with e.g. magnetic resonance imaging techniques have contributed substantially to our understanding on the pathology of many psychiatric diseases, but these studies cannot provide cellular or molecular pathologies in the brain.
Postmortem human brain studies have been conducted for more than a century to elucidate the underlying pathologies of various psychiatric and neurologic diseases, but these have been dominated by studies of structural changes. In recent years, methodological improvements have allowed for the application of a variety of analyses of postmortem brain tissue, and today reliable information from genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics can be obtained and used to characterize specific psychiatric conditions. However, for postmortem human studies it is crucial that the regions studied are precisely neuroanatomically identified, that the postmortem condition of the tissue is good, and that the phenotyping is accurate and comprehensive.
At this symposium, four researchers present studies on postmortem human brain with different purposes and approaches. The attendee will learn the possibilities that such studies can offer, but also explain important pitfalls and shortcomings, and how to avoid these.