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By Elaine Walker Elaine Walker is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Emory University.   She leads a research laboratory that is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to study risk factors for psychosis and other serious mental illnesses.  Her research is focused on the behavioral and neuromaturational changes that precede psychotic disorders.   She has published over 300 scientific articles and 6 books.  The diagnostic process can be complicated by many factors. Most of these factors reflect limitations in our scientific understanding of the nature and course of disorders. But in the current US healthcare climate, legislative proposals concerning insurance coverage for preexisting conditions add another layer of complexity to the diagnostic process. It is a layer of complexity that is riddled with ethical dilemmas which are especially salient in the field of mental health care. The following d...

On May 7 th the Emory University Graduate Students in Psychology and Neuroscience (GSPN) hosted a colloquium talk given by Vijay Mittal , assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In the talk, titled “Translational Clinical Science in the Psychosis Prodrome: From Biomarkers to Early Identification and Intervention,” Dr. Mittal, who received his Ph.D. from Emory, discussed some of his research on the prodrome for schizophrenia. 1 Dr. Vijay Mittal The prodrome for schizophrenia is a collection of neurological and psychological symptoms that can indicate risk for developing schizophrenia (as has been discussed previously on this blog) prior to the development of clinically relevant symptoms. Research on the prodrome is gaining much attention and funding because it could lead to a better understanding of how schizophrenia develops and better ways to intervene prior to its onset. Mittal began his talk with a background on the schizoph...

By Elaine Walker, Ph.D., Sandy Goulding, MPH, MA., Arthur Ryan, MA., Carrie Holtzman, MA., Allison MacDonald, MA. Elaine Walker is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology at Emory University .  She leads a research laboratory that is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health  to study risk factors for major mental illness.  Her research is focused on child and adolescent development and the brain changes that are associated with adolescence. The identification of risk factors for illness is receiving increased attention in all fields of medicine, especially cardiology, oncology, neurology and psychiatry.  There are three potential benefits to identifying risk factors. The first is to reduce morbidity by reducing risk exposure. The second is to enhance opportunities for targeting preventive treatment toward those who are most likely to benefit. Finally, the identification of risk factors can shed light o...

Psychotic disorders like schizophrenia affect about 5% of people and often result in life-long disability. Identifying at-risk individuals and predicting disease onset are crucial, and present a challenge to the development of preventative treatments. Understanding the biological mechanisms underlying psychosis are also extremely important in identifying risk factors and designing treatments. Because psychotic disorders are so disabling and usually irreversible, research interests in this field have shifted toward prevention and early intervention. Subtle pre-clinical deficits in psychosocial and neurocognitive functioning have been reported for many years and are now being extensively studied. Elucidating this pre-illness state, known as the “prodromal” period, is one area of research for Dr. Elaine Walker, the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Emory University. Dr. Walker spoke at the Frontiers in Neuroscience Seminar Series on Friday, January 27 th , ...

How has research on schizophrenia recently changed? In the past twenty years, schizophrenia research has turned its attention to the symptomatic period preceding a transition to the first episode of psychosis 1 . In an attempt to prevent or at least dampen the cognitive, social, and psychological deterioration associated with the development of schizophrenia, research has identified a host of symptoms now described as “prodromal symptoms” to schizophrenia 2 . The prodrome is the period of subclinical symptoms that develop prior to the onset of an illness, such as visual aura leading up to the onset of a migraine. With schizophrenia, these symptoms have a diverse range of manifestations from depression to grandiosity (an unrealistic sense of superiority), have no definite linear progression, and can only be retrospectively identified as prodromal schizophrenia once a transition has occurred. Until the patient develops full onset schizophrenia, symptoms can only be accurately described ...