Research on Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a severe mental illness, with devastating effects on the patients and their families. Several researchers in the Center for Cognitive Medicine focus on this disorder. Current studies include:

First Episode Psychosis study

Monitoring Cognition in Schizophrenia

Emotional Functioning in Serious Mental Illness

Affective Systems and Deficits in Individuals with Psychopathology and Controls

GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT SCHIZOPHRENIA

Schizophrenia is a neurodevelopmental brain disorder that strikes about 1 out of every 100 people. This disorder typically begins in late adolescence or early adulthood. Although every individual with the illness has a different experience, it usually has a clinical course in which acute episodes of psychosis are marked by troubling anxiety, hallucinations, delusional ideas, and other problems. These episodes can usually be brought under control with antipsychotic medications. Sometimes, "negative" symptoms persist for many years such as cognitive problems, lack of social interest, and reduced motivation to engage in common day to day activities. Depression is common, and suicide rates are estimated to range between 5% and 10% of affected individuals. About a third of patients do not receive more than mild to moderate benefit from available treatments.

Today, the causes of this illness remain unknown. Available treatments help patients recover from acute episodes of illness and help reduce risk for future relapses, but they can not cure the disorder. Further, the diagnosis of this disorder is difficult, complicating its early treatment. Factors such as developmental background, genetic and family history, changes from level of functioning prior to illness, course of illness and duration of symptoms, as well as response to pharmacological therapy may suggest a schizophrenia diagnosis.

Thus, important challenges for our field involve finding better ways to make confident early diagnoses, and finding more about what causes the disorder so that we can develop better treatments to target what is abnormal in the brain. Methods of neuroscience, including brain imaging methods, provide promising new tools to help scientists get to the root causes of the brain dysfunctions that cause this illness.

Taking advantage of these new tools, we are conducting studies to learn about the causes of this severe mental illness. We can learn the most about the biology underlying schizophrenia by working with patients who are early in their course of illness, preferably close to the time of illness onset. For these studies, we are working with patients experiencing their first psychosis, regardless of whether they have schizophrenia or some other psychiatric illness. Patients receive a standard treatment, and we retest them after stabilization so that we can separate what brain abnormalities are corrected by our available treatment and which persist even after clinical stabilization.

We are also interested in working with individuals with schizophrenia who are clinically stable on medication. These studies focus on relating symptoms, cognitive functioning, and emotional functioning to determine whether cognitive or emotional abnormalities may be related to symptoms, and/or to other aspects of functioning.

General Information about Research at the Center for Cognitive Medicine

View all studies currently recruiting participants