Table II. Findings regarding second messenger systems in bipolar disorder Eventually, understanding of such intracellular mechanisms may lead to explication of alterations in gene expression that may be involved in the pathogenesis or treatment of mood disorder. Advances in neuroiniaging represent another exciting area of progress in neurobiological Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical research. Mood disorders still lag behind schizophrenia in being a focus of such work, and future neuroiniaging research should focus more on the need for such data in mood disorders. As Meltzer79 has noted, much of the available neuroiniaging research on mood disorders has not

demonstrated clear differences from findings in schizophrenia, which some have taken to support the unitary psychosis diagnostic model. However, the relative paucity of work in mood disorders

raises the likelihood of type II error in the interpretation Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical of available small data sets due to lack of statistical power to find existent differences. Functional neuroiniaging in particular may demonstrate more subtle pathophysiological differences that may have eluded structural brain imaging such as computed tomography or magnetic resonance imaging. Again, the importance of state vs trait differences needs to be rcemphasizcd, since it is more relevant to recurrent conditions such as mood disorders than to chronic conditions such as schizophrenia. Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Alvespimycin mw Integrating biological and psychosocial aspects of bipolar disorder While research in neurobiology

Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical is central to understanding bipolar disorder, psychosocial research is also vital. In the future, we hope that theories regarding mood disorders suffer less from the reductionistic effects of Cartesian dualism than in the past. Given the emerging realization that mind and brain are not different entities belonging to different realms of experience, the distinction between the biological and the psychosocial aspects of illness begins to break down. Advances in biological research itself support Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical this approach. New developments in neuroscience are beginning to show that even subtle changes in the environment (especially early through in life) can result in long-lasting changes in the brain. These advances are based on new insights into the plasticity of the CNS, with elegant demonstrations of often-specific environmental influences on specific neurobiological processes, including gene expression. Thus, for example, in the study of stress effects, the field has moved rapidly beyond immediate, often sort-term biological responses (eg, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activation) to demonstrations of environmental manipulations producing long-lasting, even permanent changes. These changes have been shown to operate through receptor-coupled intracellular signal transduction pathways regulating gene expression that, in turn, alters the synthesis of specific proteins and cell components.