Prospects for neurology and psychiatry

Neurological and psychiatric illnesses are among the most common and most s erious health problems in developed societies. The most promising advances in neurological and psychiatric diseases will require advances in neuroscie nce for their elucidation, prevention, and treatment. Technical advances ha ve improved methods for identifying brain regions involved during various t ypes of cognitive activity, for tracing connections between parts of the br ain, for visualizing individual neurons in living brain preparations, for r ecording the activities of neurons, and for studying the activity of single -ion channels and the receptors for various neurotransmitters, The most sig nificant advances in the past 20 years have come from the application to th e nervous system of molecular genetics and molecular cell biology, Discover y of the monogenic disorder responsible for Huntington disease and understa nding its pathogenesis can serve as a paradigm for unraveling the much more complex, polygenic disorders responsible for such psychiatric diseases as schizophrenia, manic depressive illness, and borderline personality disorde r. Thus, a new degree of cooperation between neurology and psychiatry is li kely to result, especially for the treatment of patients with illnesses suc h as autism, mental retardation, cognitive disorders associated with Alzhei mer and Parkinson disease that overlap between the 2 disciplines.