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As part of its commitment to support mental health research, the IoMH has established a small grants scheme to encourage collaborative and interdisciplinary work in mental health research.
Successful applications for our small grants scheme 2023/2024
The IoMH have successfully awarded 2023/24 Small Grants to fund two proposals that support interdisciplinary mental health research.
Aberrant monitoring of mental imagery as a cause of hallucinations
Lead applicants: Dr Nadine Dijkstra (UCL Institute of Neurology), Dr Rick Adams (UCL Department of Computer Science), Professor Stephen Fleming (UCL Department of Experimental Psychology)
Description: Close your eyes and imagine an apple. For most people, this will feel kind of like seeing an apple, albeit less clear and vivid. By scanning people’s brains with an MRI scanner while they imagined different pictures, neuroscientists have shown that imagining a picture activates many of the same brain areas as actually seeing that picture. This has led scientists to wonder: given that the brain mechanisms of seeing and imagining overlap, how do we know what is real and what is only imagined?
Confusing imagination for reality is common in people with psychosis, a mental health disorder characterized by experiencing hallucinations and a loss of contact with reality. In recent experiments, psychologists have shown that, in the right circumstances, even healthy participants can sometimes mistake imagination and reality. In these experiments, participants had to imagine diagonal lines while looking at a video of white noise. Sometimes, the lines were also actually presented on the screen. It turned out that when participants imagined the lines very vividly, they sometimes thought they were real. From this, the researchers concluded that maybe the reason imagination and reality do not get mixed up more often is because our imagination is generally not vivid or strong enough to cross a reality threshold.
In this project, the same experiment will be performed via the web in a large number of participants who will also fill out mental health questionnaires, measuring, amongst other things, traits associated with psychosis. We expect that people who score high on these traits either have more vivid imagery or are more likely to think something is real; in other words, have a lower reality threshold. The results will increase our understanding of what goes wrong in psychosis and may ultimately help develop appropriate therapies.
Revolutionising Neuroimaging in Psychiatric Research: A Leap Towards Whole Brain Glutamate Imaging
Lead applicants: Kate Merritt (UCL Division of Psychiatry), Dr Barbara Dymerska (UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology), Professor Martina Callaghan (UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology)
Description: In the last two decades, neuroimaging has provided significant insights into psychiatric disorders, primarily driven by advancements in methodological innovation. Glutamate, the major excitatory neurotransmitter in the brain, is essential for normal brain function. Current neuroimaging techniques measure brain glutamate concentrations in one specific brain region at a time, but not across the whole brain. This approach has unearthed critical insights into schizophrenia, autism and OCD. However, to truly understand the glutamatergic basis of psychiatric illness, our neuroimaging methods must evolve to capture this widespread activity throughout the entire brain.
Our proposed study aims to pioneer the application of whole-brain 3D glutamate imaging at UCL, utilising the state-of-the-art 7 Tesla MRI scanner at the Department of Imaging Neuroscience, IoN, providing enhanced resolution over conventional 3 Tesla scanners. This advancement marks an almost 10x increase in spatial resolution, enabling glutamate measurement from 3.4mm isotropic voxels (30,000 voxels in total), a substantial improvement over the current methodology, which is restricted to a single large 20mm³ voxel.
3D glutamate imaging has been developed in Europe and is beginning to be applied at UK institutions. This grant will allow us to establish 3D glutamate imaging at UCL and assess its reproducibility in healthy volunteers. This pilot data is crucial for future grant applications for both applicants. It will enable Dr Merritt to perform statistical power analysis for the future application of 3D glutamate imaging in schizophrenia. For Dr Dymerska, the data will inform future grant applications aimed to develop high resolution simultaneous structural and metabolic imaging.
We will collaborate with a European consortium led by Dr Hangel at the Medical University of Vienna to harmonise data acquisition. This will pave the way for future collaboration for both methods’ development and multicentre glutamate studies in schizophrenia. By integrating 3D glutamate imaging into ongoing studies at UCL, we anticipate groundbreaking insights into neurodevelopmental disorders.