Monday, August 31, 2015

Psychotic patients distinguished from controls while watching movie 'Alice in Wonderland'

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-08/econ-ppd082715.php

Public Release: 30-Aug-2015
Psychotic patients distinguished from controls while watching movie 'Alice in Wonderland'
European College of Neuropsychopharmacology

Researchers using fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) have found that even first-episode psychotic patients process information differently from a control group. To ensure both groups experienced the same brain stimuli, the measurements were taken while the subjects watched a movie, Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. The work is being presented at the 28th ECNP Conference in Amsterdam.

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'In this work, we attempted to determine whether a person is a first-episode psychosis patient or a healthy control subject just by looking at their brain activity recorded during movie viewing. We found, that by monitoring activity in a region known as the precuneus we were able to distinguish patients from control subjects especially well. This would mean that the precuneus, a central hub for the integration of self- and episodic-memory-related information, plays an important role in this kind of information processing of psychotic patients.

She continued:

We were able to achieve almost 80% classification accuracy using these methods. This is the first study which directly associates the beginnings of psychosis with the precuneus, so it is now important that much more research is done in this area'. The researchers hope that this approach can feed into earlier screening and better diagnosisof at-risk populations.

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