Dissecting the brain-cognition relationship in schizophrenia and adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Axel Krug; Professorin Dr. Alexandra Philipsen; Professor Dr. Alexander Radbruch
• Subject Area: Biological Psychiatry ; Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 537435156

Studies of the last years have suggested an overlap of psychopathological symptoms, cognitive impairments, brain morphometric changes, course of disorder as well as genetic and environmental risk factors in psychiatric disorders. These insights strongly suggest the necessity to study psychiatric disorders in a translational manner to disentangle commonalities as well as still existing differences in these entities. The aim of the current proposal is to study these differences and commonalities in schizophrenia and adult attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder. To this end, a cohort of patients and healthy controls will be deeply phenotyped on a variety of levels: It is proposed to study cognition, personality as well as factors of risk and resilience. The main focus of the study will be an in-depths brain morphometric MRI investigation of all subjects. Within this focus, well-established markers such as fiber-tract integrity and grey matter morphometry will be investigated. For these markers, large cohorts for replication and augmentation are available. A uniquely new element of this proposal is the additional use of new MRI methods not widely used in psychiatric research so far, Quantitative T1-Mapping and Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping. These brain morphometric markers will be associated with the additionally assessed phenotypes to investigate brain-behavior-relationships within and between patients and controls. In addition to standard uni- and multivariate analyses, hypothesis-free machine learning techniques will be employed to generate new insights into differences and commonalities of brain-behavior relationships in these disorders. Data will be analyzed in Bonn but will be available to national and international consortia such as ENIGMA.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants