The synapse: center stage for many brain diseases

Synapses are anatomical specializations at the interface of two neurons. They have fascinated researchers ever since Sherrington coined the term ‘synapse’ in 1879. Studies of synapses have provided amazing insight into their function and were boosted by the discovery, now more than 30 years ago, that synapses can undergo long-term activity-dependent plasticity. Over the last two decades much effort has been devoted to the study of long-term synaptic plasticity as a candidate mechanism underlying learning and memory. More recently dysfunctional synaptic plasticity has been implicated in several brain diseases, such as depression, addiction, dementia and anxiety disorders. Here we report on an international meeting that took place in Geneva in July 2008 that brought together scientists who study synapses and disease mechanisms. Brain diseases constitute a major burden to society. In Europe, alone, it is estimated that direct and indirect costs of brain diseases represent more than 350 billion euros per year. When broken down into individual diseases the most costly are depression (105 billion euros, a sum equal to the cost of all cardiovascular diseases), addiction (56 billion even without including nicotine abuse), dementia (54 billion) and anxiety disorders (40 billion), followed by autism and schizophrenia. The Synaptic Basis of Disease meeting, which was organized as a satellite meeting to the July 2008 FENS meeting in Geneva (Fig. 1), was convened to bring together leading researchers working on basic synaptic mechanisms with those working on neurological disorders. Indeed, many labs at the meeting have programs working on both aspects. The main focus of the meeting was to generate discussion amongst some of the leading experimentalists working on synaptic and disease mechanisms. Figure 1 The poster for the symposium