RESEARCH CENTER ON THE PSYCHOBIOLOGY OF ETHNICITY

描述(改编自申请者摘要)：该中心是 成立于1990年。其主要任务是弥合两国之间的差距 生物和社会文化研究工作，并促进 建立一个更加全面融合的生物-心理-社会-文化 精神病学研究和实践的方法。此续期申请 寻求五年的支持以继续和扩大该中心的研究 议程。建立在其坚实的基础设施和 在过去五年中开发的研究工具，该中心计划 将先进的研究方法应用于临床和社区 设置，以同时评估生物、 心理社会和文化因素在精神疾病发病率、病因学和 治疗反应，并检查这些因素可能如何相互作用 彼此之间的关系。还将介绍卫生服务方法，以 允许使用从现有药物处方派生的数据 监控系统。 这项提案中包括的研究项目包括五项研究 审查以下问题的领域：(1)临床应用 新近开发的多种族/多基因的药物遗传学探针 不同精神疾病的文化患者；(2) 磁共振波谱技术在脑内锂离子浓度测量中的应用 与锂反应的种族差异有关；(3) 对重度抑郁症的生物心理社会评估，包括横断面和 纵向，在多民族精神卫生保健环境中；(4)长期-- 华裔美国人社区样本的长期纵向随访 ICD-10定义为神经衰弱的患者；以及(5)使用大型 药物处方的次要数据集，用于研究种族 与其他临床和社会人口学变量相互作用影响 药物处方的模式。 这种生物医学和社会文化传统的更全面的融合将 帮助确保精神病学研究的进展 适当有效地应用于来自不同国家的患者 社会文化和种族背景。同时，跨种族和 跨文化观察和测试将做出重大贡献 为验证和进一步发展精神病学理论和 练习。

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.