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While dramatic scientific breakthroughs are the stuff of headlines and researchers’ dreams, most scientific progress is built step by step on a foundation of knowledge derived from prior research.
In the realm of research on schizophrenia and depression, the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD) is among those organizations that recognize and support research that may not make headlines today but will improve patients’ lives tomorrow. In addition to NARSAD’s annual Lieber and Selo awards (Psychiatric News, November 21), the organization’s annual symposium serves as an intellectual clearinghouse where dozens of the best minds in the field come together.
Herbert Pardes, M.D., dean of Columbia University School of Medicine, is president of NARSAD’s scientific council. He served as moderator for the alliance’s annual symposium this October in New York City.
NARSAD, said Pardes, "symbolizes a unity of people coming from different backgrounds and different constituencies who unite around a single theme, which is research in the service of getting control over psychiatric illness."
Here is a sampling of NARSAD-supported research discussed at the symposium:
Marina Picciotta, Ph.D., is studying the role of nicotine in dopamine regulation and cognition using animal models. Picciotta is an assistant professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at Yale University School of Medicine.
She observed that it is common knowledge among clinicians that an unusually high percentage of people with schizophrenia smoke cigarettes. Smoking is one of the most precise, rapid, and controllable modes of drug administration. Nicotine affects cognition, attention, and anxiety, and it seems plausible that people with schizophrenia may be using the drug to help them focus their attention, she said.
One important biochemical effect of nicotine is that it boosts dopamine, the brain chemical associated with pleasure.
To investigate how nicotine might affect the kind of drastic attentional deficit seen in schizophrenia, Picciotta and colleagues created a genetically engineered strain of mice whose brains lack the high-affinity nicotine receptor. Although the mice appear normal to a casual observer, when subjected to stress they show subtle but important differences in dopamine regulation and learning, Picciotta said. Using this fundamental research to develop a behavioral model of attention, Picciotta hopes to determine whether nicotine can be used to treat attentional deficits in schizophrenia.
Alan S. Brown, M.D., is looking at the interactions between genetic and prenatal environmental factors in schizophrenia. Brown is an assistant professor of psychiatry and associate director of the department of epidemiology and community psychiatry at Columbia University in New York. Based on a study using a birth cohort from 12,000 pregnancies from 1959 to 1966, Brown aims to quantify data on prenatal and perinatal exposure and familial genetic influences to develop a model of genetic-environmental variables in schizophrenia.
Using serological data from this cohort and detailed perinatal records, Brown hopes to determine whether the impact of family history on the risk of schizophrenia and other disorders is "modified in the presence of two in utero exposures, influenza and folate deficiency, and a set of perinatal exposures, [namely] obstetric complications." All these variables, he notes, have been implicated in schizophrenia.
E. Sherwood Brown, M.D., Ph.D., a research fellow at the University of Texas-Southwestern, is investigating whether corticosteroids can provide a model for bipolar disorder. Corticosteroids such as prednisone commonly induce severe psychiatric side effects including emotional lability.
William Byne, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, is investigating how the anatomy of the thalamus, which is critical in pain perception and processing and integrating information, varies in schizophrenia.
Sarah Lisanby, M.D., who is a research fellow and an assistant in clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, is employing transcranial magnetic brain stimulation to probe the neural regulation of mood.
The "psychopharmacology of impulsivity" in relation to the brain’s serotonin system is the realm of Christopher Reist, M.D., vice chair of the department of psychiatry and human behavior at the University of California, Irvine. His research has been conducted at the Long Beach (California) Veterans Administration Hospital, where Reist is chief of mental health.
While the preponderance of research is biologically oriented, Guy Diamond, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, is investigating family-based treatments for adolescents with depression, and Laura Roberts, M.D., an assistant professor of the department of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico, is studying the perspectives of schizophrenia patients regarding their participation in research.