BIPOLAR DISORDER
1. Introduction:
Neural cells derived from patients with Bipolar Disorder (BD) show a difference in the way they migrate as compared to controls. This difference may contribute in a fundamental way to brain tissue repair & assembly.
2. Neural Tube:
- Brain development starts early during pregnancy, which starts with a single layer of cells that roll up to form a tube called a Neural Tube.
- It is a process that takes up many cells migrating through large distances.
- The trajectories of migrating neural precursors lay the foundation for developing the brain.
- The speed & direction of migrating cells can alter the regional cellular makeup & the wiring of cortical areas.
- The neural precursor cells derived from stem cells of people with bipolar disorder showed a difference in the way they migrated as compared to neural precursors derived from stem cells of people without bipolar disorder.
| Bipolar Disorder is a severely disabling illness where a person's mood, energy, activity levels & ability to carry out day-to-day activities undergo unusual shifts over a period. |
3 . BD & Brain Structure:
- The illness has a genetic basis & neurodevelopmental origin.
- Many studies have documented abnormalities in the brain structure of patients with BD.
- Some abnormalities include smaller brain size, reduced cortical grey & white matter,and decreased number of interneurons in the cerebral cortex & hippocampus regions.
4 .Complications:
- Systemic dysregulation may produce the aberrant cellular phenotype, which could contribute to the functional & structural changes in the brain reported for bipolar disorder.
- This implies that if the irregularities in migration exist in the formative stage, these could form a mature brain that has the sort of abnormalities seen in people with BD.
- These differences perhaps exis, but need not always convert into disease as the changes are too subtle.
Source: The Hindu
