LIBR Investigators receive a four–year R01 collaborative grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to study interrelationships between inflammatory transcripts, genes and positive valence system function in anhedonia. Jerzy Bodurka, Ph.D., Program Director for the grant will lead the team of scientists from LIBR, the University of Tulsa, the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, and the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. The goal of the proposed research is to assess gene transcription from white blood cells, imaging measures of brain function and behavioral assessments of reward responsiveness along a dimension of anhedonic mood symptoms. Researchers will attempt to prove that inflammation plays a major role in the onset and perpetuation of the reduction in pleasure and motivation that many individuals experience in the clinical conditions that currently are subsumed under the diagnostic categories of depression, other mood disorders or chronic fatigue. The team hopes to identify an abnormal pattern of gene transcription and brain function that will be sufficiently distinct from the normal pattern that it can be used to objectively establish a diagnosis based on biology, as opposed to self-reported symptoms, and that this diagnostic category will predict the likelihood that an individual with this disorder will benefit from particular types of treatment.
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