Effects of neural precursor cells abnormal migration

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Subject: Science and Technology

Context-

Neural cells derived from patients with bipolar disorder (BD) show a difference in the way they migrate as compared to controls, finds a study.
This difference may contribute in a fundamental way to brain tissue repair and assembly.

BD and brain structure

Bipolar disorder is a severe disabling illness where a person’s mood, energy, activity levels and ability to carry out day-to-day activities undergo unusual shifts over a period.
The illness has a genetic basis and neurodevelopmental origin.
Many studies have documented abnormalities in the brain structure of patients with BD.
Some abnormalities include smaller brain size, reduced cortical grey and white matter and decreased number of interneurons in the cerebral cortex and hippocampus regions.

Brain development and its relation to Bipolar disorder-

Brain development starts early during pregnancy.
This starts with a single layer of cells that roll up to form a tube called the neural tube.
The brain develops at one end of this neural tube.
It is a process that takes up many cell divisions as well as cells migrating through large distances.
The speed and direction of migrating cells can alter the regional cellular makeup, and, therefore, the wiring of cortical area.
The key result of the work is that the neural precursor cells derived from stem cells of people with bipolar disorder showed a difference in the way they migrated as compared to neural precursors derived from stem cells of people without the bipolar disorder (Controls).

Increased risk

If the irregularities in migration exist in the formative stage, these could form a mature brain that has the sort of abnormalities seen in people with BD.
These differences perhaps exist but need not always convert into disease as the changes are too subtle.
However, they do increase the risk in general.