NIMH

With the aid of a four-year, $3.4 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) will apply new techniques to investigate treatment resistance of two devastating mental disorders — major depressive disorder, which befalls 15 percent of people at some point in their lives, and schizophrenia, which affects approximately 1 percent.

Targeting the immune system may provide a new avenue for therapeutic intervention in psychiatric diseases characterized by motivational and cognitive deficits.

An international team of researchers has integrated gene expression and disease association data to better understand the biological mechanisms of complex human diseases.

Brain imaging studies have implicated the connection between two brain regions in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia.

Vanderbilt researchers have identified an interaction between two proteins that play a role in learning and memory.

Vanderbilt investigators have discovered that oxidative damage may play an important role in the development of a rare cholesterol synthesis disease and in the behavioral changes of autism spectrum disorders.

Researchers in the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health are testing whether a unique “couples-centered” intervention developed in the southern African nation of Mozambique can reduce mother-to-child transmission of HIV.