india: the science (11)

considering i've now been here for nearly a week (minus approximately 5 hours, as i write), perhaps it would be appropriate to explain WHY exactly i travelled half-way around the world to visit Bangalore. the situation, in general terms, is as follows:

i am currently a grad student in Toronto, and i am interested in the relationship between stressful experiences and the emergence of psychopathology (i.e. symptoms of anxiety, fear, depression, mania, psychosis, etc). for a while now, there has been evidence from patients which suggests that having something very stressful happen to you can precipitate the onset of a mood disorder, and also that the way in which your body and brain is programmed to respond to stress can predict your chances of developing a mood disorder when presented with a very stressful event.

for the past little while, i have been working on a project that takes this potential link between stress and psychopathology and uses it to explore the effects of drugs used to treat psychopathology. basically, if you are stressed, certain things happen in your brain. these certain things are quite possibly involved in the emergence of mood disorders in predisposed individuals. the question is, how do we KNOW that they're REALLY involved in the emergence of mood disorders? as usual in science, this is not a simple question to answer. one of the approaches we can take is to see whether drugs that are currently used to treat mood disorders are able to PREVENT stress-induced brain things from happening. the logic being that:

stress --> brain things, stress --> changes in behaviour

drug --> prevents stress-induced brain things, drug --> prevents stress-induced changes in behaviour

therefore, stress-induced brain things may be related to symptoms treated by the drug

make sense?

it is these 'stress-induced brain things' that have led me to India. here is a quick lesson on neurons: neurons are cells of the nervous system (i.e. spinal cord, brain, blah). neurons are kind of like us, they have a body (called the soma) and appendages (called axons and dendrites). these appendages form contacts with other cells, and communication happens where they meet (at junctions called synapses). on certain types of neurons, synapses form on special structures called spines (for more detail, see Wikipedia entry). this means that on these particular neurons, the number of SPINES present can reflect the number of SYNAPSES present. very helpful, because spines are something we can see AND COUNT under a normal microscope.

it so happens that STRESS affects the number of spines on certain types of neurons. which has led me to my current project.

and that is what i'm doing in India. counting spines. yes, i spend my days in a little tiny closet with a microscope and my iPod... listening to rilo kiley and mouse-clicking a picture of a neuron on the computer screen every time i see a little bump on a dendrite. it's actually quite exciting, when you think that i'm LOOKING AT A CELL OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM!!! and COUNTING the NUMBER OF CONTACTS IT MAKES WITH OTHER CELLS!!! sometimes i feel like a young Ramon y Cajal, ready to open my sketchbook and make detailed drawings of complicated dendritic arbors...