Psychiatry and the microscope - the application of cellular brain quantitation to characterize psychiatric disorders

This article will outline the newly developing stereological methods of qua ntitation. Such techniques are becoming increasingly relevant to investigat ions of psychiatric disorders. Sensitive and accurate methods of detecting cellular alterations are essential when studying disorders such as schizoph renia and mood disorders in which the microscopic brain changes are subtle. This review will firstly address issues of sampling the brain tissue for q uantitative studies, secondly the various probes that are available for ass essing cell number and size will be mentioned, and finally the principles o f assessing cell spatial arrangement will be discussed. Examples of stereol ogical studies of psychiatric disorders are included.