Virtual: Brain meeting: Professor Mitul Mehta

Brain meeting 

Functional imaging with MRI combined with pharmacology brings insights into the variation in physiological markers, connectivity and task-related activation, task-related connectivity. The principal measures are haemodynamic and say nothing about the pharmacological targets related to the responses.  The ability to provide molecular insights would greatly enhance pharmacological MRI approaches. Classically this has been achieved by pharmacological subtraction or blocking methods which may be inferentially powerful but are experimentally more demanding, requiring multiple visits and consideration of unwanted effects of the blocking agents. Clarifying the neurochemical mechanisms underlying functional changes after different compounds is a potentially tractable approach to link drug action to neurovascular coupling methods and can be extended to psychopathological investigations to examine premorbid and concurrent receptor variations. Integrating molecular information about target distribution provided by PET can enrich the pharmacological fMRI analysis. Such integrations has been used to investigate overlapping expressions of receptor targets of MDMA and methylphenidate and the associated relationships to subjective and cognitive performance.