Ikonomovic Milos D
Departments of Neurology and Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA 15261, USA.
Cardiovasc Psychiatry Neurol. 2009;2009:427840. doi: 10.1155/2009/427840. Epub 2009 Apr 15.
Epidemiological studies point to a strong and possibly causal association of psychiatric and neurological disorders with cardiovascular disease (CVD). Mechanistic links between these co-occurring illnesses are not well understood. Better insight into their relationship could help identify novel diagnostic markers and therapeutic targets. For successful translation of basic biomedical research into clinical practice, analyses of postmortem human tissues are essential. However, current tissue banks dedicated to psychiatric and neurological research collect only brain tissue samples deemed most important to the institution's participating investigators. While this practice is often dictated by budget constraints, restricted tissue storage space and other practical reasons, it limits the ability of the biological research community to access and study multiple organ systems relevant to cardiovascular and neuronal systems dysfunction. This problem is worsened when clinical records pertaining to coexistent systemic pathology are not available. To promote further understanding of co-occurring CVD and psychiatric/neurological disorders, efforts should be made to support tissue banks that harvest heart, coronary arteries, and aorta samples as well as brain tissue, from the same subjects.
流行病学研究表明，精神疾病和神经疾病与心血管疾病（CVD）之间存在着紧密且可能具有因果关系的联系。人们对这些共病之间的机制联系尚未完全了解。深入了解它们之间的关系有助于识别新的诊断标志物和治疗靶点。为了成功地将基础生物医学研究转化为临床实践，对人类尸检组织进行分析至关重要。然而，目前专门用于精神和神经研究的组织库只收集对该机构参与研究的人员来说最重要的脑组织样本。虽然这种做法往往是由于预算限制、组织存储空间有限和其他实际原因所决定的，但它限制了生物研究界获取和研究与心血管和神经系统功能障碍相关的多个器官系统的能力。当缺乏与并存的全身病理学相关的临床记录时，这个问题会变得更加严重。为了进一步促进对同时发生的心血管疾病和精神/神经疾病的理解，应该努力支持那些从同一受试者身上采集心脏、冠状动脉和主动脉样本以及脑组织的组织库。
