Psychosis is a generic psychiatric term for mental states in which the components of rational thought and perception are severely impaired. Persons experiencing a psychosis may experience hallucinations, hold paranoid or delusional beliefs, demonstrate personality changes and exhibit disorganized thinking (see thought disorder). This is usually accompanied by features such as a lack of insight into the unusual or bizarre nature of their behavior, difficulties with social interaction and impairments in carrying out the activities of daily living. Essentially, a psychotic episode involves loss of contact with reality, sometimes termed "loss of reality testing". Psychosis is one of the hallmark features of Schizophrenia and its related disorders. (Source: Wikipedia. For more info click here...)

 

Cortical Surface Measurement in Psychosis
PI: Patrick Barta, MD, PhD
IRB# 84-12-12-02

The study proposes to measure the surface area and thickness of the cerebral cortex in four groups of subjects: healthy controls and patients with Down Syndrome, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The methods used will yield extensive information about both normal and abnormal cortical anatomy that cannot be obtained easily from post-mortem studies. These methods are sufficiently general to be used in other diseases as well. This project specifically aims to develop new methods for measuring structures in the cerebral cortex, biologically validate these measurements in studies where the pahtology is known (Down Syndrome), and to apply these methods in studies where the pathology is unknown (schizophrenia and bipolar disorder).

-- This project is now completed --

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Functional MRI and Formal Thought Disorder
PI: Paul Rivkin, MD

Formal Thought Disorder (FTD) manifests as a disturbance in expressed language, not arising from pathological disorders peripheral to the brain, e.g. vocal cord pathology. FTD describes a disruption in the form of thinking that is distinct from abnormalities in content, e.g. delusions. FTD can be quantified using pathological descriptors such as derailment, tangentiality, incoherence, pressured speech and others. This study uses functional MRI to assess performance and cerebral activation in schizophrenic patients engaging in a feature binding task which requires making linguistic associations between objects. We hypothesize that schizophrenia with marked formal thought disorder will exhibit decreased thalamic activation during this task.

-- This project is now completed --

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