Missing Links

Pfizer Foundation Fellowship:

"Missing links: cause and treatment of mental illness"

This fellowship is supporting research into major mental illness - including schizophrenia, anxiety and ADHD. These disorders are defined by breakdown in high-level functions of cognition and emotion, which rely on the connectivity of many brain systems. In this fellowship, new measures of brain connectivity are being developed and applied to the study of these disorders. In addition, a second key focus is the question of whether available medication for these disorder produces an improvement in these measures of brain connectivity.

The fellowship research is contributing to a paradigm shift in human neuroscience and mental health, from a focus on the single neuron to recognition that understanding complex brain disorders will require a focus on the interaction of multiple brain systems.

Basic research has identified candidate measures of brain interaction and connectivity which may now be developed for application in psychiatric groups. Thus, the aims of the fellowship are to:

1. Develop new methods for identifying markers of brain disconnection in schizophrenia, anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
2. Apply these markers to evaluating the efficacy of new treatments for these disorders.

The fellowship has made it possible to achieve a very high rate of progress, and to achieve significant new breakthroughs in this field of human neuroscience and mental health.

Theoretically, the integrative theoretical model which underpins the research program has been further developed, and published in Neuroscientist (invited review)

The research outcomes are the first to show that:

1. Emotional and cognitive markers are valuable predictors of real-life functional outcome from first episode of schizophrenia. These findings have been published in Schizophrenia Research.
2. These markers are also reflected in brain changes from first episode reported for the first time. This finding has been published in American Journal of Psychiatry (editorial).
3. There are distinct emotional markers in ADHD which may distinguish co-morbid anxiety, associated with distinct brain changes. This finding has been published in Biological Psychiatry.

PUBLICATIONS:

• Williams LM (2008) Voxel based morphometry in schizophrenia: Implications for neurodevelopment connectivity models and cognition and affect. Expert Reviews in Neurotherapeutics, 8(7), 1049-1065 (invited review)
  
• Williams LM & Gordon E (2007). The dynamic organization of the emotional brain: responsivity, stability and instability. The Neuroscientist, 13, 349-370 (invited review)
• Williams LM, Das P, Liddell BJ, Olivieri G, Peduto AS, David AS, Gordon E & Harris AWF (2007)Fronto-limbic and autonomic disjunctions to negative emotion distinguish schizophrenia subtypes. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 155, 29-44.
• Williams LM, Felmingham K, Kemp AH, Rennie C, Brown KJ, Bryant RA & Gordon E (2007) Mapping frontal-limbic correlates of orienting to change detection. Neuroreport, 18(3), 197-202.
• Williams LM, Palmer D, Liddell BJ, Song L & Gordon E (2006) The 'when' and 'where' of perceiving signal of threat versus non-threat. Neuroimage, 31, 458-467.

Pfizer Fellowship team

Professor Lea Williams

Next project >>

Return to Cognitive Neuroscience Main Page