PHRM30002: Drugs Affecting the Nervous System

Continuing assessments comprising LMS delivered assessments (15%) and a multiple choice question assessment delivered during the semester (15%)
A 2 hr examination in the examination period (70%)

This subject can be done either as part of the neuroscience or pharmacology major. If you are from a neuroscience background --> while the subject has pre-requisites you can contact the coordinator and he will let you do the subject without the pre-reqs. If you haven't done PHRM20001 I would recommend getting hold of a biomed student and reading their pharm notes for BIOM20002 (which is also a pre-req). This is just so you know and understand the basic principles of pharmacology which the coordinator would ask you to read up on anyway. You can look at PHRM20001 notes if you have access to them but that covers a lot of stuff not required for this subject so getting the notes off a biomed student would save you a lot of time.

Content
So this subject was interesting and coming from a neuroscience major I quite enjoyed the pharmacology/therapeutics parts of the subject. The subject starts off with some basic neuro concepts like blood brain barrier, nerve transmission etc. as well as some topics on neuronal survival and neuropeptides. The subject then moves on to neurotransmitters with a lecture devoted to each of the 6 major neurotransmitters. These particular lectures are given are by different lecturers so they have different ways of presenting them. For example for some lectures you were expected to know the areas in the brain the neurotransmitter was made and which parts/ pathways it acted on. But the basic idea of this section was to introduce us to the actions of these neurotransmitters, how to modulate them via drugs to enhance or reduce these actions in certain disorders/conditions. The next section covered things like apoptosis and neurotoxicity and the immune system in the brain. The rest of the subject was on specific nervous system disorders like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, Schizophrenia, Addiction, depression as well was pain, epilepsy and sleep. These lectures focused on how they may arise as well as the drugs used to improve these conditions. I really liked this part of the subject because it was disease focused and most of the lecturers presented them well.

Tutorials/quizzes/written assignments
Yes, there are tutorials. But these are during lecture times and there are four of them spread out across the semester with the last one for exam preparation. So what happens is the lecturer would email a past exam question (based on a topic covered in the preceding weeks) that will be discussed during the tute. And before the tute he will also make available a multiple choice quiz on lms generally covering all the topics covered up to the tute which doesn't count towards your final mark but you have to do it before the tute. During the tute students are expected to give their input while discussing the question and are encouraged to attempt the question beforehand. I felt the tutorials give a good insight to what the lecturer expects from you when answering their exam questions. The tutorials are of course recorded and you don't have to go to them but the lecturers often do write on the board and the students who answer questions asked by the lecturer aren't clearly heard in the recordings so you might miss out on stuff if you don't go.

The written assignments are what counts to your final mark. It's basically your answer to the question discussed in the tute. The tute questions tend to be the essay questions from the Part A of the exam which I will get to. So with the help of the discussion in the tute you are meant to write up an answer to the questions and submit it via turnitin before the deadline. For the first two written assignments, the deadline was 48 hrs after the tute but for the third one we had to submit it by 5pm the day of the tute. So not sure how the deadlines are going to be in the following years and how many written assignments are going to be done but there is definite chance that this type of assessment may continue because of the positive feedback the lecturer said he got. I reckon this was a good way to practice answering the questions for the exam so definitely take advantage of it. Each written assignment was worth 5% and was marked out of 10. You don't get specific feedback but email the lecturer if you want feedback on it and they are always happy to help.

Midsemester exam
Held in week 6. It was based on lectures week 1-4 and had 30 multiple choice questions. Pretty straightforward. Worth 15%

Lecturers
I've listed the names of all the lecturers above. Some of the lecturers were repeating their lectures given to PHRM20001 so for those who haven't done PHRM20001 or can't remember stuff from PHRM20001 everything is repeated so you don't have to worry about it. But this happened in like 2 or 3 lectures anyway. The rest was new content (I think). Some of the lecturers were great. They were funny and really interesting. There were others who were a bit dry but they weren't too bad. Overall, I thought everything assessed in the exams was fair and was discussed in the lectures anyway. So if you know your content thoroughly the exams should be fine. I'm not going to go into detail about each lecturer and their content because this subject has changed so much over the past few years that I think they might change a bit of it next year. Most of what the lectures talked about was generally material that could be assessed. Very rarely the lecturer would talk about something you didn't have to know for the exam and most of them were pretty clear as to what you should know for the exam. They do have diagrams that were taken from various textbooks and literature so you won't have to know all of the diagram just the relevant bits to the lecture. But if you have any questions about individual lecturers and what they would assess from their lectures I would suggest you email them directly. They were all very nice and helpful with any of the queries I had.

Exam
The exam was in two parts. The first part was the essay question/long answer questions. We had to select 4 out of the 5 given questions. Each was 20 marks and you should allocate 20 mins for each. These types of questions are what are discussed in tutes. So doing the tutes would be good practice for this type of question. Some of the questions were from individual lectures while there was one that expected us to integrate information from different lectures e.g in our exam we had a question asking us to compare and contrast neurotransmission of acetylcholine and substance P which were discussed in two different lectures but different lecturers so expect something like that. There are past exams available to work out what types of questions are going to be asked and they were really helpful. You don't have to do the past questions but just having look at them would mean you would know what to expect in the exam. Also just a hint James gave us at the last tute: the topics/tute questions assessed during the semester are very unlikely to pop up on the final exam. He did however say that only lectures not assessed in the midsem will have multiple choice questions and unless I was mistaken there were about 3 or 4 questions that were related to topics already covered in the multiple choice exam so you might want to make sure he is clear. That brings me to Part B of the exam which was 40 multiple choice questions. Again straightforward and not too hard. Nothing on there wasn't on a lecture so as long as you know your lectures well you will do fine in this section. It was 40 minutes so 1 mark=1 min. I'd suggest trying to finish this within 30 mins so you have an extra 10 minutes for part A which is worth 80 marks. Since the MCQ section was only introduced this year I think based on the feedback they got from previous years the past exams had no multiple choice questions. However the quizzes that are made available before each tute should be enough practice for this part. The coordinator also made it available during swotvac for revision. But really after 5 semesters of science/biomed I don't think you would really need any practice for MCQs

That's all I can think of saying right now. If I remember anything important I'll add to this. I just wanted to include some subjects that I or a friend thought would be helpful if taken with PHRM30002 due to overlapping content (that would make life a hell of a lot easier for a third year ) or because they complement each other. I'll add more to the list if I find or hear about any other subject that might be helpful in anyway:

• PHRM30003 Drug Treatment of Disease
• The uni breadth subject conducted by the pharmacology department which I can't find the name or code for (help?! )
• NEUR30003 Neurophysiology for some ion channel stuff and signalling pathways/molecules that you might come across and knowing the names and what they do already helps
• NEUR30004 Sensation, Movement and Complex Functions which also runs in sem 2 which I took along with this as part of my neuroscience major. There were overlapping topics that are useful but can get confusing if you aren't sure which is relevant to what lectures. For example, molecule Orexin was involved in addiction in SMCF but in this subject it was covered with respect to sleep. So it might get confusing for some people but a lot of people did this subject combination and I don't think any of us regretted that choice other than the fact that the exams were one the SAME DAY!!! But if you are organised during the semester and are constantly revising you will find that these two subjects nicely complement each other in many topics that were covered: glial cells and glutamate and GABA reuptake and metabolism, alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, depression, addiction, epilepsy, pain and sleep

I hope this was helpful and sorry it's a bit later than I expected it to be posted. I didn't go into too much detail about each of the lecturers or the topics because there might be a chance that they change some stuff around next year. In terms of difficulty this subject would rate a 2.5 out of 5 where 5=braincrushing hard. The subject also might be a stepping stone for most people who are planning to do honours and is pretty well organized. Good luck with your subjects and message me if you have any questions or if something on here wasn't clear

Yes, with screen capture

A/Prof J Ziogas, A/Prof RA Hughes, Dr Mark Habgood (1 lecture), Dr M Hansen, Prof D Hoyer, Prof P Beart, Prof B Dean, A/Prof P Crack, Dr J Taylor, Dr R Hester, A/Prof C Wright, Dr C Laska and some lady who took the schizophrenia lecture who wasn't listed in the lecture timetable

Yes, from 2010-2012.

4 out of 5

Individual lecturers will recommend reading specific parts of different texts that are available at the library while the handbook gives two texts that are relevant for most lectures. But all this is for interest and not assessed. So I would recommend not buying the books if this is the only pharm subject you are doing and just go to the library if you really need one.

3 lectures one hr lectures per week

2014 Semester 2

TBA