Estimation of DOPAMINE in the Human Brain Tissue: Post-Mortem Studies in a Group of Suicides and in a Control Group

Abstract

Mind has managed to enthrall from common man on the street to researchers and scholars alike, especially when it approaches to mental diseases like Depression, Anxiety, Schizophrenia, Huntington, Alzheimer or to the Act Of Suicide. The stories of someone known or unknown committing suicide has stewarded its way to the morning newspaper headlines and has tended to hold our miniscule attention every so often. Without losing sight of the fact, we have endeavoured to dig out the biochemical relation behind suicide in our research.

Dopaminergic pathways of brain have long been panned out as the chief commander of reward, motivation and people’ likes and dislikes psychology and also their association with major diseases like Schizophrenia, Parkinson disease, psychosis, Huntington disease been turned out to be a fact. Nucleus accumbens, neostriatum and substantia nigra’s dopamine loss over time leads to anhedonia, which is one of the major risk factor of suicide.

The scientific experiments among rats, mice have corroborated the influence of stress, aggression, strong like, dislike psychology over Hypothalamo-Pituitary Axis, culminating to a deranged cortisol and dopamine secretion which incepts suicidal behaviour and eventually the act.

We in our research have exerted to decipher the puzzle among humans on the same theorem for Dopamine by using pre-frontal cortex samples of suicide victims (N=30, CASES) and comparing it to pre-frontal cortex samples of road-traffic accident victims (N=30, CONTROLS).

Keywords: Suicide, Dopamine, HPLC, HPA, Mental Illness.