NSC 518 Basic Mechanism of Nervous System Disorders

Graduate-level survey of how nervous system disease actually happens at the cellular and molecular level, the shared failure modes (excitotoxicity, oxidative stress, neuroinflammation, protein aggregation, apoptosis) that connect conditions as different as Parkinson's, epilepsy, migraine, mood disorders, and ischemic stroke. You'll work through weekly readings from Zigmond and Kandel, hand in homework every week, and give a presentation tying a specific disorder back to its underlying mechanism. It assumes you already have basic neurophysiology down, and serves as the mechanistic backbone for clinical neuroscience and translational research, where the goal is figuring out where in the cascade an intervention could actually work.