Brain Banking in Psychiatric Disorders: The Amsterdam Experience

Abstract

The growing number of sophisticated neurobiological techniques that can be applied on postmortem brain obtained from psychiatric patients increases the pressure on brain banks to supply autopsy material to the scientific community. Brain banks that collect postmortem tissue from patients with psychiatric disorders form an important link between clinicians, scientists, and neuropathologists. The rapid autopsy system we set: up in Amsterdam for collecting brain specimens for research on depression, bipolar disorders, and schizophrenia includes matching for several factors, both antemortem and postmortem. Antemortem factors include age, sex, agonal state, seasonal alterations, circadian variation, clock time of death, and medication. Postmortem factors include postmortem delay, fixation and storage time, and lateralization. The material and data collected by the Netherlands Brain Bank as presented in this chapter illustrate the wide variety of potentialities and pitfalls in the use of autopsy tissue for research on psychiatric disorders.