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NIMH grant will fund research on impaired learning, memory in schizophrenia
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The NIMH recently awarded a 5-year, $3.2 million grant to Jeffrey Stanley, PhD, and Vaibhav Diwadkar, PhD, of Wayne State University School of Medicine, to investigate the role of brain plasticity, function and network dynamics within underlying mechanisms of impaired learning and memory in schizophrenia.
“Today, managing cholesterol is a widely accepted treatment pathway in cardiac disease,” Diwadkar said in a press release. “In many ways, biological psychiatry is in its infancy, yet to better treat neuropsychiatric conditions, understanding the brain is imperative. There is no other organ in the body to which psychiatric illnesses can be related as they can be to dysfunctional processes in the brain.”
Stanley and Diwadkar will conduct a study, titled “Advancing Innovative Brain Imaging to Detect Altered Glutamate Modulation and Network Dynamics in Schizophrenia,” using a combination of functional MRI, complex analyses of brain imaging data and functional magnetic resonance spectroscopy.
“While fMRI data are somewhat ‘distant’ from fundamental neurobiological processes because the signal relies on blood flow that is correlated with — but distinct from — neurophysiological and neuro-chemical events, in developing [functional magnetic resonance spectroscopy] we are able to measure and quantify changes in hippocampal glutamate in the brain. We have an imaging technique that may provide more direct information about functional changes in the brain,” Stanley said in the release.
Using this combination of imaging techniques may provide objective biomarkers of schizophrenia and researchers plan to evaluate interventions for such markers.
“Because the pathophysiology of schizophrenia remains obscure, our efforts have been in the area of innovative image analyses and methods development. Schizophrenia is fundamentally a disorder that disrupts cognitive and memory processing, psychological processes that depend on normal communication between brain region,” Diwadkar said in the release. “Therefore, using [functional MRI], we have primarily been interested in how brain regions fail to ‘communicate’ appropriately during basic processing. Several of these investigations have zeroed in on the dorsal prefrontal cortex, or [dorsolateral prefrontal cortex], and the hippocampus, two brain regions that are particularly implicated in the illness. The [dorsolateral prefrontal cortex] has been particularly implicated with regard to the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia; the hippocampus has been implicated with regard to the glutamate hypothesis of the illness.”