Disorders of the Developing Nervous System
Disorders of the Developing Nervous System: Changing Views on Their Origins, Diagnoses, and Treatments
Edited by John W. Swann and Anne Messer
New York. Alan R. Liss, 1988. 269 pp.
Disorders of the Developing Nervous System: Changing Views on Their Origins, Diagnoses, and Treatments is a volume based on the proceedings of the Birth Defects Symposium XVIII, held in Albany, New York, in September 1987. The book contains thirteen chapters written by 32 individuals, and is edited by John Swann and Anne Messer of the Birth Defects Institute, New York Department of Health. A possible criticism of this book is that many of the experimental findings are published by these authors elsewhere (e.g., The New England Journal of Medicine, Neurology, and Annals of Neurology). This circumstance is often a characteristic of books derived from symposia, however, and the strength of this work lies not in the novelty of its experimental results, but rather in its broad and masterful coverage of numerous “hot” areas in neurobiology. Thus, the reader is introduced to neuroimaging techniques being employed for the diagnosis and study of neurological disorders (e.g., PET scan in the diagnosis of epilepsy, MRI changes specific to the cerebellum of autistic individuals), the role of NMD A receptors in mechanisms of hypoxic-ischemic brain injury, and gene mapping and cloning in Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Other disorders dealt with in this book are cerebral palsy, dyslexia, Down’s syndrome, PKU, and storage diseases.
The individual chapters are written with exceptional clarity, and are easy to follow; each contains appropriate amounts of background information to orient the reader, which is probably due to the fact that each chapter is based on a talk at the Birth Defects Symposium. Although the central themes of this volume are the developing nervous system and childhood disorders of the nervous system, several papers contain information relevant to disorders of the adult nervous system (e.g., hypoxia-ischemia, epilepsy, and Alzheimer’s disease). This feature will undoubtedly provide the book with a larger audience. In addition, its emphasis on histopathology (especially those chapters dealing with neuroanatomic changes observed in autism), will be of interest to neuropathologists. The majority of the chapters are extremely readable and provide enough interesting information to maintain the reader’s attention, without becoming overly detailed and dry. Certain chapters tend toward the obscure, however, and their subject matter is more difficult to follow. This criticism is particularly true of the chapter entitled “Timing of cell interactions in cerebellar development.” The chapter contains a veritable maelstrom of information on cerebellar mutations in several mice strains (e.g., sg/sg, Lc). In addition, the chapter entitled “Synaptic mechanisms of focal epileptogenesis in the immature nervous system” would be more readily understood if it contained a more extensive introduction to elementary neurophysiology.
On the whole, I would recommend this book. I think it will be of interest to adult and pediatric neurologists, neuropathologists, and neurobiologists. Its strength lies in its clear presentation of the research being conducted in neurobiology today.