BOOK
Renato Luiz Marchetti
Institute and Department of Psychiatry of the Clinical Hospital of the Medical School of the University of São Paulo
Bases biológicas dos transtornos psiquiátricos
Flávio Kapczinski, João Quevedo e Iván Izquierdo e colaboradores. Porto Alegre: Artmed, 2004, 503 páginas. 2a edição.
ISBN 85-363-0283-6.
The breakthrough related to the biological foundations of mental disorders in the last ten years hampers psychiatrists to learn, organize and synthesize the information, as to develop a comprehensive and integrated view of this field of knowledge. This task will be enormously facilitated for those who would dedicate themselves to the reading of the second edition of 'Biological foundations of psychiatric disorders'. These renowned authors accomplished the Herculean task of transmitting these updated knowledge in a didactic way. Modestly, they have admitted that any attempt of systematization in this area would be incomplete. They managed, however, to reflect the progress in the major areas which constitute the current biological psychiatry.
The text is structured in five sections: 1) The central nervous system; 2) Neuropsychological assessment; 3) Biological treatments; 4) Psychiatric disorders and; 5) New developments.
In the first session, the authors deal extensively and comprehensively with the biological foundations of the central nervous system. Subjects such as the neuron, neurotransmitters, neuroanatomy, neuroplasticity, psychoneuroendocrinology, psychoimmunology, neurotoxicology, genetics and animal models of mental disorders are didactically and elegantly presented, making the reading not only informative, but also quite pleasant. However, the careful reader will occasionally feel the absence of the description of the neuroplastic mechanisms related with the kindling biological model, which is important for the description of the neuropsychiatric phenomena that are possibly associated with epilepsies, but that are also considered for bipolar disorders and substance dependence.
In the second section, the instruments for neuropsychological and neuroimaging investigation are presented. In the chapter on neuroimaging, the methods of structural and functional imaging are discussed.
The third section explores the foundations of psychopharmacological and electroconvulsive therapies. We felt the absence of a chapter on psychosurgery, a still polemic issue in psychiatry, but which is an important source for the biological foundations of some mental disorders.
In the fourth section, the authors summarize the most important information regarding the biological foundations of the most important mental disorders. The approach is predominantly theoretical and the psychopathological and/or clinical aspects are described only to lay the foundations of the biological approach. Nevertheless, the authors, in general, do not fall into biological reductionism.
Special efforts for the development of an integrating view can be observed, such as the chapters on obsessive-compulsive disorder and impulsivity. The approach in this section is somewhat unbalanced regarding the presentation of mental problems of neuropsychiatric disorders: although the mechanisms involved in the epileptogenesis in the chapter on epilepsies are brilliantly presented, the authors do not mention neither the frequent and important mental disorders associated with this neuropsychiatric condition, nor their biological mechanisms, what does not happen in the chapter on Parkinson's disease. This fact does not reduce the brilliantness of these presentations.
According to the authors, the last section - in which the role of phospholipase A2, adenosine, prion, protein S 100b and oxidative stress in mental disorders are described was destined to transmit the idea that there is a permanent progress in this area and that any treatise on the subject is equivalent to a picture of a moving object. Surely, a nice picture.
We must, therefore, celebrate the arrival of 'Biological foundations of psychiatric disorders', enjoy its reading or consultation and only wait for the next edition.
Publication Dates
-
Publication in this collection
30 Mar 2004 -
Date of issue
Mar 2004
