The National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression is providing almost $700,000 this year to 11 Yale University and affiliated researchers to study causes and treatment for mental illness.
Among the topics NARSAD is supporting at Yale are the genetics of schizophrenia; brain imaging of schizophrenia and bipolar disease; and the biochemistry of fear conditioning in anxiety.
NARSAD is the largest donor-supported organization in the world devoted exclusively to funding scientific research on psychiatric disorders. The awards to Yale include one Distinguished Investigator Award and 10 two-year Young Investigator awards.
The Distinguished Investigator Award Program provides support for experienced investigators conducting neurobiological research with a particular interest in patient populations with unique or unusual characteristics and innovative projects that might not otherwise receive funding.
The Young Investigator Award Program provides support for the most promising young scientists conducting neurobiological research relevant to schizophrenia, major affective disorders, or other serious mental illnesses.
The Yale investigator who received the Distinguished Investigator Award is Sherman Weissman, M.D., who will apply an emerging technology called Genomic Tiling Microarrays to research 22q11 deletion syndrome-associated schizophrenia. About 25 to 30 percent of patients with this syndrome also develop schizophrenia.
Vince Calhoun, Institute of Living/Hartford Hospital and Yale School of Medicine, aims to use fMRI brain imaging to distinguish between people with schizophrenia and those with bipolar disorder to help differentiate the conditions.
Hyun-Sang Cho, M.D., VA Connecticut Healthcare System, West Haven Division/Yale University, proposes studying in humans whether nicotine improves the deficits in attention and information processing induced by a drug that blocks the NMDA receptor.
Arie Kaffman, M.D., Ph.D., Yale School of Medicine, will use a mouse model to study the effect of postnatal maternal care on neurogenesis (PMC) - the re-growth of neurons in the brain - and determine whether some of the behavioral conditions of poor PMC are due to its ability to modify this process.
Evelyn Lambe, Yale School of Medicine, studies the prefrontal cortex, which is the target of the ascending arousal pathway and is critically involved in attention. Patterns of activation within this region are disordered in patients with schizophrenia and depression, particularly during cognitive tasks.
Sherry McKee, Yale School of Medicine, will study the effects of mecamylamine, a nicotine acetylcholine receptor antagonist, on smoking behavior and resultant nicotine plasma levels at baseline and after nicotine abstinence in schizophrenic and healthy control smokers matched for cigarette use and nicotine dependence.
Peter Morgan, M.D., Connecticut Mental Health Center/Yale University, proposes studying why some people with schizophrenia are susceptible to alcoholism and relapse. Results could lead to a greater understanding of alcoholism in schizophrenia and to more effective treatments.
Surojit Paul, Yale Child Study Center, proposes studying in the rat a particular aspect of the biochemistry of fear conditioning in the amygdala, a region of the brain known to play a central role in both normal fear and pathological anxiety.
Golan Shahar, Yale School of Medicine, aims to study hopelessness depression, a subtype of depression, and its role in psychosis. Findings should have the potential to illuminate the course, correlates, assessment, and intervention of depression, a prevalent, but poorly understood, complicating factor in psychosis.
James E. Swain, M.D., Yale Child Study Center, will use fMRI to examine the role the limbic-hypothalamic midbrain circuits play in post-partum depression. The work could lead to larger projects to study parents with other postpartum psychiatric illness and to gather information on long-term infant outcome and interventions.
Min Wang, Yale School of Medicine, proposes studying in monkeys the role of dopamine receptors in the prefrontal cortex for working memory deficits, which are implicated in the cognitive dysfunctions and pathogenesis of schizophrenia.
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