Nancy Andreasen is an American physician, professor of psychiatry and director of the Neuroimaging Research Center. He also works at the Center for Clinical Research for Mental Health at the University of Iowa School of Carver Medicine.
Perhaps, if we are not related to medicine or psychiatry, her name will not tell us much, however, she is a renowned researcher whose work has contributed greatly to many studies related to schizophrenia.
- Despite this.
- Her university life was not always related to medicine.
- As Andreasen studied literature.
- She is also a doctor of English literature and specializes in Renaissance literature.
- Worked as a teacher in this field.
- But her life took an unexpected turn.
- Turn.
After the birth of her first daughter, Andreasen had serious health problems that led her to make a decision: studying medicine, her desire to know went out and she eventually decided on psychiatry.
However, his research is not limited to psychiatry, but encompasses several areas such as creativity, spirituality, neuroimaging, genome, natural history and the neural mechanisms of schizophrenia, so we would like to invite you to discover below the contributions of this interesting physician.
What exactly do we mean by him? Andreasen was a pioneer in many ways, a woman who dared to lay the first stone several times, so her career has been deeply marked by these?
She also contributed to the field of psychiatric diagnosis in the DSM III and DSM IV working groups, in fact, she was responsible for laying the groundwork for the study of stress disorders by drafting the definition of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for DSM. Ⅲ.
Andreasen was also president of the American Association of Psychopathology and the Psychiatric Research Society and is currently a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Nancy Andreasen, an expert in the field of schizophrenia, has conducted numerous researches that have helped to understand its mechanisms and improve its treatment.
Schizophrenia is one of the most important public health problems. It affects 1% of the world’s population and, according to the World Health Organization, ranks ninth among all medical diseases in terms of overall disease weight; goes beyond cancer, AIDS, heart disease, diabetes and other serious illnesses.
Signs and symptoms of schizophrenia are diverse: they include perception disorders, such as hallucinations, inferential thoughts, in other words, delusions; goal-oriented behavior (abstinence) and emotional expression (emotional maturity), among others; however, none of its multiple signs and symptoms can be considered pathognomonic or decisive.
Thus, each symptom is present in some patients, but none is present in all; In this sense, schizophrenia differs from most other mental illnesses that generally affect only one brain system, such as Alzheimer’s disease (memory) or manic-depressive disease (mood). ).
Symptoms and signs of schizophrenia are very diverse and complex. Therefore, recent work has been done to simplify thinking about the disease, subdividing it into natural categories.
Modern reconceptalysis developed by Dr. Andreasen divides symptoms into ‘positive’ and ‘negative’. It defines positive symptoms as an exaggeration of normal functions (the presence of something that should be absent) and negative symptoms as a loss of normal functions (the absence of something that should be present).
In the language of neuroscience, schizophrenia is a disease that affects distributed neural circuits, more than individual cells or regions. These disorders are sometimes called poorly connected syndromes. Most people with schizophrenia have a subjective feeling that their ability to think and feel has become disorganized or disconnected in some way.
Neuroimaging tools have allowed us to study how the brains of people with schizophrenia work differently. These studies have shown us that the subjective experience of “disconnection” or “disorganization” reflects a problem in the ability of certain regions of the brain to send feedback messages effectively. and accurately.
Therefore, the etymology of the name of the disease is more than adequate. It literally means “fragmented or disconnected”. In this way, it describes what you observe through neuroimaging tools.
Currently, Nancy Andreasen continues her research by conducting studies that contribute to the knowledge of schizophrenia and, therefore, improve its treatment, this research includes structural and functional studies of neuroimaging, longitudinal evolution and results, studies that examine genetic and genomic factors and integrate into neuroimaging studies.
In short, we are faced with an important personality in the field of psychiatry and, more specifically, schizophrenia, a doctor who continues to dedicate himself tirelessly to research, a doctor to which we owe enormous advances in this field.