RESEARCH CENTER ON THE PSYCHOBIOLOGY OF ETHNICITY

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DESCRIPTION (Adapted from Applicant's Abstract): The Center was established in 1990. Its primary mission is to bridge the gap between biological and sociocultural research efforts and to contribute towards the establishment of a more fully integrated bio-psycho-socio-cultural approach to psychiatric research and practice. This renewal application seeks five years of support to continue and expand the Center's research agenda. Building upon the solid foundation of its infrastructure and research tools developed over the past five years, the Center plans to apply advanced research methodologies into clinical and community settings, to concurrently assess the influence of biological, psychosocial and cultural factors in psychiatric morbidity, nosology and treatment responses, and to examine how these factors might interact with one another. Also introduced will be health services methodology to allow the use of data derived from an existing medication prescription monitoring system. The research projects included in this proposal include five research areas examining the following issues: (1) the clinical utility of recently developed pharmacogenetic probes with multi-ethnic/multi- cultural patients suffering from different psychiatric conditions; (2) the use of MR spectroscopy to measure lithium concentration in the brain in relation to ethnic differences in response to lithium; (3) biopsychosocial assessment of major depression, both cross-sectional and longitudinal, in a multi-ethnic mental health care setting; (4) long- term longitudinal follow-up of a community sample of Chinese-American patients with ICD-10 defined neurasthenia; and (5) the use of a large secondary data set of medication prescriptions to study how ethnicity interacts with other clinical and sociodemographic variables in affecting the patterns of medication prescription. This fuller integration of biomedical and sociocultural traditions will help to ensure that advances in psychiatric research will be appropriately and effectively applied to patients from diverse sociocultural and ethnic backgrounds. At the same time, cross-ethnic and cross-cultural observations and testing will contribute significantly to the validation and further development of psychiatric theories and practices.