Description du projet
Cibler l’insula pour traiter la dépression
L’addiction et la dépression sont des troubles psychiatriques caractérisés par une prise de décision sous-optimale en raison d’un traitement anormal des informations négatives. Les tâches menées en laboratoire pour évaluer le processus de prise de décisions chez les personnes reproduisent fidèlement des situations réelles, fournissant ainsi aux participants des pistes pour orienter leurs décisions qui peuvent, par exemple, conduire à gagner ou perdre de l’argent. Le projet Island in the brain, financé par l’UE, étudiera l’implication du cortex insulaire (insula), une région cérébrale, dans la prise de décision. Le cortex insulaire a été impliqué dans la prise de décisions et dans plusieurs troubles psychiatriques. Le projet développera également une nouvelle manière d’évaluer la prise de décision orientée par des pistes suivant un schéma de risque et de punition chez des rats. Les résultats permettront de tester les stratégies thérapeutiques ciblant l’insula.
Objectif
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.
Champ scientifique
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Programme(s)
Régime de financement
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinateur
3584 CS Utrecht
Pays-Bas