Descripción del proyecto
Mecanismos biológicos subyacentes compartidos en los trastornos psíquicos
Prácticamente un tercio de la población europea sufre una enfermedad mental y cada vez hay más pruebas que indican que muchos trastornos psíquicos se solapan en cuanto a genética y sintomatología. El objetivo del proyecto CONNECT, financiado con fondos europeos, es encontrar un mecanismo biológico subyacente compartido para esas enfermedades y parte de la hipótesis de que los principios organizativos de la red encefálica forman un sistema común que determina las relaciones entre trastornos. El proyecto mapeará el espacio encefálico de las relaciones entre enfermedades para identificar mecanismos específicos y compartidos de la función cognitiva y la disfunción de la enfermedad. La investigación incluirá una base de datos de resonancias magnéticas para analizar huellas cerebrales para una amplia variedad de enfermedades. Después realizará una modelización y aplicará un método de aprendizaje automático para diferenciar las características específicas de las enfermedades de las compartidas.
Objetivo
The brain is one of the most complex living systems we know and has an enormous capacity to regulate our physiology, behaviour and cognition. 30% of the European population however has to deal with a mental challenge, ranging from depression to burnout to psychosis, etcetera. These conditions are traditionally seen as separate disorders, but there is growing evidence that many mental conditions share overlap in terms of their genetics and symptomatology. The brain mechanisms behind this cross-disorder overlap reflecting a common biological factor of mental conditions remains unknown. One of the key problems is that the current field is centralised around ‘single-condition examinations’, lacking specificity and selectivity of macroscale mechanisms, leaving us blind for which brain attributes play a common versus a unique role across and within mental conditions. The goal of CONNECT is to find an underlying shared biological mechanism of mental conditions: I hypothesise that the organizational principles of the healthy brain network form a common network system for shaping relationships across disorders. With CONNECT I want to map the total brain space of cross-disease relationships to disentangle shared and specific mechanisms of cognitive function and disease disfunction. I want to build (WP0) a large multi-disorder MRI database to compare (WP1) brain fingerprints across a wide range of conditions. I will (WP2) develop a mechanistic framework to fundamentally describe cross- condition interactions and model the shared mechanisms of involvement of brain networks in brain function. This model will be leveraged into (WP2/3) a comprehensive connection catalog that systematically maps for all circuitry their common vs unique role in cognitive functions and their subsequent involvement in the spectrum of mental conditions. Disentangling disease-common from disease-specific effects, I will use Machine Learning to pave the way for (WP4) ‘prediction connectomics’.
Palabras clave
Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantInstitución de acogida
1081 HV Amsterdam
Países Bajos