A total of 9,479 brains – some are missing due to various circumstances.

• The collection contains approximately 50,000 tissue blocks embedded in paraffin, i.e. all the blocks originally made for diagnostics.

• Histological slide trays from approximately 6500 patients are preserved, i.e. approximately 250,000 slides.

The brains are collected from Danish psychiatric patients between 1945-1982. The most frequent diagnoses among the patients are dementia, schizophrenia, mania, and depression.

All brains have been autopsied and sectioned accordingly; consequently, there are no whole brains in the collection. The tissue is stored as sections.

All tissue is either preserved in formalin or embedded in paraffin.

There are no brains from people without disease (control brains).

There are no fresh frozen tissue.

There is no service for ordering tissue for shipping – all projects are collaborations where scientists visit the brain collection and dissect relevant areas of the brains for their project.

Patient data such as age, date of death, and clinical diagnoses are available for each brain. 

All information regarding the patients and tissue is written on paper in Danish and often in handwriting. This includes the medical records, pathology reports, responsum/summary and the associated protocol books.