Hosted by the Wellcome Neural Dynamics PhD Programme
In part 1 of the talk, I will present recent work completed during my post-doc at King’s College London. Approximately one third of patients with schizophrenia fail to respond to antipsychotic medication – termed ‘treatment resistance’ – and the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Here, I present data suggesting poor cognitive control may be a mechanism underlying treatment resistant schizophrenia. We investigated effective connectivity within a network of interacting regions responsible for cognitive control, sensory and reward processing using Dynamic Causal Modelling (DCM) whilst patients performed an fMRI reward learning task. Treatment-resistant patients had reduced top-down connectivity compared to treatment-responsive patients which may be underpinned by a glutamatergic abnormality (as measured using MR spectroscopy). Our findings suggest that treatment resistance may represent a subtype of schizophrenia with a distinct underlying mechanism that is not targeted by current medication.
In part 2 of the talk, I will (informally) present some of my current interests around the causal role of sleep loss on the development of mental illness (e.g. depressive and psychotic symptoms). In particular the effects of sleep/circadian disruption on cognitive control and what makes some people more vulnerable to these effects. I hope to create more of an informal discussion around these ideas as I am really keen to hear more about similar research taking place in Bristol and to collaborate.
We ask that all attendees wear face masks during the seminar and that you do not attend if you are displaying any symptoms of covid-19, please also RSVP to the calendar event so that we can keep an eye on numbers and manage things accordingly.
Contact Luke Burguete to confirm your place to manage numbers.