The Stanley Medical Research Institute (SMRI) is a non-profit organization with a primary mission to fund research on the cause and treatment of severe mental illnesses. The SMRI also supports a brain bank as part of the mission to facilitate research into mental illness. The SMRI brain bank distributes postmortem samples from individuals with serious mental illness, free of charge, to scientists around the world. The SMRI brain bank is recognized for the unique way it is set up, organized, and administered. Cohorts of demographically-matched groups of patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder (BP), or major depression (DEP) and unaffected controls are organized such that all researchers applying for tissue received samples from the same cohort. The SMRI was the first to include multiple diagnostic categories in the cohorts as well as the first to include a large number (N) of cases in each group. The Stanley Neuropathology Consortium (SNC) was the first cohort established and contains 60 brains (15 in each of 4 groups); it was the largest cohort of subjects with major mental illness that was available when the cohort was established in 1997. The Array Collection (AC) was a subsequent cohort with an N of 35 in each of 3 groups and was established in 2002. Pathologists from the offices of designated medical examiners in the USA were trained in standardized collection techniques. All medical and psychiatric records were obtained and reviewed by two senior psychiatrists. A psychiatrist also contacted one or more family members by telephone to clarify and verify before making the final DSM-IV diagnosis. For the normal controls, a psychiatrist conducted a structured telephone interview with first-degree family members to obtain all pertinent psychiatric and medical history as described in Torrey
et al., 2000 [
1]. A pathologist performed a standard neuropathological examination for every case. While cases were relatively young (average age 45 years), all brains were screened for the presence of cardiovascular disease, hemorrhage, trauma, tumors, or other pathology and confirmed by the examination of appropriate sections from the suspect area. Cases were also screened for Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, ethanol-induced changes, and anoxic/hypoxic-related alterations and also for RNA integrity. Only brains that were free from pathology and that had intact RNA were included in the final research cohorts. Controls have no history of any neurologic or psychiatric disorder. Within each research cohort the diagnostic groups and controls were matched for age, sex, race, postmortem interval (PMI), pH, and side of brain frozen. …
