Dr. Jeffrey Gladden explores whether psychiatric disorders stem from broken mitochondria. Post-mortem studies found over 100 abnormal mitochondrial proteins in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, suggesting energy production failures may underlie these illnesses rather than just brain chemistry imbalances.
It's really thinking about metabolism and energy production as the main thing that's failing in all of these psychiatric conditions.
So we're talking about mitochondrial function. Is that what you're talking about? Just not enough ATP in the brain? That can certainly be a piece of it. It's a big piece of it.
There's been shown to be mitochondrial dysfunction in postmortem brains of all these serious mental illnesses.
Okay. Right.
So, and I think that one of the reviews I looked at, In schizophrenia and bipolar, more than 100 problematic mitochondrial proteins found. Yeah. And in major depression, about 50 or so. So mitochondria is a big part of the story. It's not the only part of the story. I think we're sort of working a little bit backwards from the mechanisms that we know about these approaches from the work in epilepsy over the course of many decades, and which one of those really seem important for psychiatry. And it turns out most of them are important in psychiatry.
