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Study Guide and Self-Examination Review of Psychiatry, consists of multiple-choice questions and answers; it is designed for students of psychiatry and for clinical psychiatrists who require a review of the behavioral sciences and general psychiatry in preparation for a variety of examinations. The questions are modeled after and consistent with the format used by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (ABPN), the National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME), and the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE). Other parts of the system are the various editions of the pocket
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The authors are committed to classifying drugs used to treat mental disorders according to their pharmacological activity and mechanism of action rather than using such categories as antidepressants, antipsychotics, anxiolytics, and mood stabilizers, which are overly broad and do not reflect, scientifically, the clinical use of psychotropic medication.
The major neurotransmitters are the monoamines, amino acids, and neuropeptides. Other chemical messengers include neurotrophic factors and an array of other molecules, such as nitric oxide.
The recognition that these three systems communicate with each other has given birth to the fields of psychoneuroendocrinology and psychoneuroimmunology. Another property shared by the CNS, the endocrine system, and the immune system is the regular changes they undergo with the passage of time (e.g., daily, monthly), which is the basis of the field of chronobiology.
An endophenotype is an internal phenotype, which is a set of objective characteristics of an individual that are not visible to the unaided eye.
The potential role of an endophenotype can be further clarified by stating what it is not. An endophenotype is not a symptom, and it is not a diagnostic marker. A classification based on the presence or absence of one or more endophenotypes would be based on objective biological and neuropsychological measures with specific relationships to genes and brain function.
Perhaps 70 to 80 percent of the 25,000 human genes are expressed in the brain, and because most genes code for more than one protein, there may be 100,000 different proteins in the brain. Perhaps 10,000 of these are known proteins with somewhat identified functions, and no more than 100 of these are the targets for existing psychotherapeutic drugs.
approximately 40 to 70 percent of aspects of cognition, temperament, and personality are attributable to genetic factors.
