International Journal of Emergency Mental Health and Human Resilience
Open Access

Abstract

Neuropsychiatric disorders are commonly induced by acute (TBI, stroke, chemical poisoning, and infections by pathogenic microbes) and chronic (brain tumors, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, and neurodegenerative diseases) brain insults. Clinical manifestations of neuropsychiatric disorders may vary among the patients with different types of brain insult, depending on the cause, type, severity of injury, acute or chronic condition, and the brain regions affected, as well as on the age and health status of the patient. However, 40% of neuropsychiatric signs and symptoms were found to be commonly shared by traumatic, infectious, toxic, oncogenic, and degenerative brain insults, suggesting that the same or similar brain regions/structures can be possibly affected by different brain insults. The histomorphological basis for neuropsychiatric disorders might be the progressive neuronal cell death and neural injury in the brain regions such as the limbic system, basal ganglia system, brainstem, basal forebrain, cerebellum, and cerebral cortex. Because most of the brain regions affected are far away from the initial injured site, the histomorphological alterations in the remote brain regions may mainly result from secondary neuronal damage triggered by the initial insult. Secondary neuronal damage may be largely responsible for subsequent neuropsychiatric disorders. However, it should be noted that clinical manifestations of neurological disorders may tend to be similar even when the histomorphological alterations in the brain region affected are dissimilar, because the brain has only a few common pathophysiological responses (such as cerebral edema, inflammation, cytotoxicity, loss of cerebral blood flow autoregulation, and the apoptos) to injuries.

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