Clinical neurochemistry

Clinical neurochemistry is the field of neurological biochemistry which relates biochemical phenomena to clinical symptomatic manifestations in humans. While neurochemistry is mostly associated with the effects of neurotransmitters and similarly functioning chemicals on neurons themselves, clinical neurochemistry relates these phenomena to system-wide symptoms. Clinical neurochemistry is related to neurogenesis, neuromodulation, neuroplasticity, neuroendocrinology, and neuroimmunology in the context of associating neurological findings at both lower and higher level organismal functions.

Neuropharmacology and drug action

The integration of knowledge concerning the molecular and cellular actions of a drug within the brain circuitry leads to an overall understanding of a neurological drug's action mechanisms. This understanding of drug action in turn can be extrapolated to account for system-wide or clinical manifestations which are observed as symptoms. The clinical effects of a neural drug are due to both immediate changes in homeostasis and long-term neural adaptations characterized by the phenomena neural plasticity.

The most basic and fundamental neurological phenomena in neuropharmacology is the binding of a drug or neurologically active substance to a cellular target. One assay to determine the extent at which a ligand binds to its receptor is the radioligand binding assay (RBA), in which specific binding of a radioactively-labeled ligand is denoted by the difference between saturated and non-saturated tissue samples. While the RBA assay assumes that the tissue prepared has just one molecular target per ligand, in actuality this may not be the case. For example, serotonin binds to many diverse serotonin receptors which makes the RIA assay quite difficult to interpret.