Читать книгу Neurobiology For Dummies - Frank Amthor - Страница 84

Genetics is absolutely amazing: A random shuffle of genes from two parents get thrown together, producing a working nervous system from the proteins encoded. This nervous system is produced with 80 to 100 billion cells and at least 100 trillion synapses. Of course, the process doesn’t always have perfect results, and sometimes things go wrong. This section discusses some of these cases.

Nervous system disorders include some fairly well-understood sensory problems such as blindness, deafness, and motor disorders like myasthenia gravis (see Chapter 16), whose causes (but not necessarily cures) we know at the cellular level. Problems that affect mental functions are more complex, such as learning disabilities, schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Neurological illnesses are among the most challenging and expensive health problems in the United States. This is particularly true for degenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, which strike our increasingly elderly population.