Project Summary

Debra Titone, Ph.D. (Young Investigator 2002) of McLean Hospital, is studying the role of the hippocampal memory system in schizophrenia, based on promising results from her first NARSAD Young Investigator award.  She will examine transitivity performance in schizophrenic patients, nonpsychiatric and psychiatric controls using event-related functional MRI (efMRI).  She expects to find attenuated hippocampal activation during transitivity performance in schizophrenic patients relative to psychiatric and nonpsychiatric controls.  She also expects to replicate the hippocampal memory deficits and structure-function correlations of her current project for the new group of participants.  She previously examined whether schizophrenic patients were impaired relative to nonpsychiatric and psychiatric (i.e. bipolar patients) controls on a memory task that was affected adversely by hippocampal lesions in animals (the ordered transitivity task).  She predicts hippocampal activation will increase, relative to the baseline pairs, as a f(x) of increases in the amount of stimulus integration necessary to respond correctly to the training and probe pairs.  This is the first study of transitivity using fMRI and structural MRI in normal controls as well as in schizophrenia and bipolar patients.  The results will bridge human and animal work by showing hippocampal dysfunction in schizophrenia on a task that recruits hippocampal areas in controls, and that is impaired in non-human animal with selective hippocampal lesions.

Program Area: SCHIZOPHRENIA/PSYCHOTIC DISORDERS\Schizophrenia

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