The author is the winner of The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000 for his studies of learning and memory. This book is a good revision of psychiatric and neurological disorders, as well as an update on its pathophysiology at molecular and genetic level.
I like how he perceives the future of psychiatry and neurology, and how personalised medicine will play a greater roles :
“The new biology of mind will lead to radical changes in the way medicine is practiced, in two ways. First, neurology and psychiatry will merge into a common clinical discipline that focuses increasingly on the patient as an individual with particular genetic predispositions to health and disease. This focus will move us toward a biologically inspired, personalized medicine. Second, we will have, for the first time, a meaningful and nuanced biology of the processes in the brain that go awry in brain disorders,”
“It is likely that personalized medicine, with its focus on clinical DNA testing-the search for small genetic differences in individuals —will reveal who is at risk of developing a particular disease and thus enable us to modify the course of that disease through diet, surgery, exercise, or drugs many years before signs and symptoms appear. Currently, for example, newborn babies are screened primarily for treatable genetic diseases, such as phenylketonuria. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, children at high risk for schizophrenia, depression, or multiple sclerosis will be identified and treated to prevent changes that would otherwise occur later in life. Similarly, middle-aged and older people may benefit from a determination of their individual risk profile for late-onset diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. Indeed, DNA testing should also allow us to predict individual responses to drugs, including any side effects they may cause, leading to drugs tailored to the needs of individual patients.”
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