Descripción del proyecto
La ínsula como diana para tratar la depresión
La adicción y la depresión son trastornos psiquiátricos que se caracterizan por una toma de decisiones deficiente debido a un procesamiento anormal de la información negativa. Las tareas de laboratorio para evaluar la toma de decisiones en humanos imitan bien las situaciones de la vida real, al aportar a los participantes señales para orientar sus decisiones, las cuales pueden, por ejemplo, acabar por hacerles ganar o perder dinero. En el proyecto financiado con fondos europeos se estudiará la implicación de la región del encéfalo denominada corteza insular (ínsula) en la toma de decisiones. La corteza insular interviene en la toma de decisiones y en varios trastornos psiquiátricos. Además, se desarrollará una nueva forma de evaluar el riesgo guiado con pistas o la toma de decisiones con castigo en ratas. Los hallazgos serán útiles a la hora de probar estrategias terapéuticas centradas en la ínsula.
Objetivo
Psychiatric disorders such as addiction, depression and anxiety disorder are characterized by suboptimal decision making (DM) due to aberrant processing of negative information. However, it remains unclear which brain processes underlie suboptimal DM. One candidate brain region involved is the insular cortex (insula), which has been implicated in DM and in several psychiatric disorders. Laboratory tasks to assess DM in humans closely mimic real-life situations, providing participants with cues to guide their decisions, which can lead to winning or losing money, much like weighting information about risks and benefits when choosing between investing in stocks or bonds. However, the technology available to study the human brain is limited, whereas experiments with rodents allow for a detailed and fine-grained understanding of brain function. Importantly, in order to translate results between rodents and humans, the tasks used to assess behaviour need to be comparable, but there are currently no tasks in rodents to study cue-guided DM in the face of punishment. During the fellowship, I will study the involvement of the insula in DM when using cues to inform rats about potential punishments and benefits. To achieve this, I will: 1) Develop a novel behavioural task to assess “cue-guided risk/punishment decision making” in rats. 2) Assess the contribution of the insula by perturbing neural signalling in this brain region, and the network it is embedded in. The novel task has tremendous translational value in that it parallels tasks used in human populations and mimics real-life decisions. Therefore, the results of the project are relevant for testing the efficacy of treatment strategies targeted at the insula to alleviate psychiatric disorders such as anxiety disorders and addiction.
Ámbito científico
Palabras clave
Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinador
3584 CS Utrecht
Países Bajos