Banco de tejidos neurológicos de Sant Joan de Déu-Serveis de Salut Mental para la investigación de las enfermedades mentales. La importancia de un programa de donación en vida

Central Nervous System Tissue Banks (CNSTB, Brain Banks) contain collections of samples of brains and other neurological tissues from donors who are either healthy or affected by some sort of neurological or mental illness. Brain banks are useful for genomic and proteomic analyses of neuropsychiatric diseases. The Sant Joan de Déu Brain Bank (SJDBB) was created in 2004 and is an archive of tissue samples from donors with mental illnesses. The number of donors currently stands at 100. Of the donors, 24 have died, providing 24 frozen samples of cerebral sections. All donors, or their legal representatives, provided informed consent and their relatives were also informed. A complete psychiatric and physical examination was carried out with all donors. Diagnoses were confirmed by means of the Structured Clinical Interview (SCID) for DSM-IV, and both symptom severity and neuropsychological functioning were assessed. Although all donors had a primary diagnosis of psychotic disorder, the first few donors showed a high prevalence of neurodegenerative and vascular diseases, which is not infrequent in newly created brain banks. This brain bank opens the possibility of conducting research in psychiatric patients, as well as of investigating comorbidity between mental and neurological disorders and the possible role of treatment in lifestyle and cardiovascular disease. Contact is currently being made with centers, organizations and health professionals to increase the number of donors; thus, the number of samples that could be offered to the scientific community for future psychiatric studies would also increase.