Motivational processing, Mesolimbic and Mesostriatal Function in Neuropsychiatric Disease

在许多精神和神经疾病中，动机和对奖励事件的反应都会受到不利的影响：许多精神病或帕金森氏病(PD)患者缺乏动力，并经历冷漠。此外，患有某些疾病的患者，如患有精神病的年轻人，似乎被无关的信息过度激励，他们似乎发现这些信息很吸引人。这也可能发生在帕金森病患者身上，可能是药物治疗的次要结果。但人们对大脑层面上这些动机异常的确切原因知之甚少。一个原因是，很少有研究试图研究患者的这些过程，因为直到最近，研究患者大脑动机过程的技术和方法还不发达。在(A)核磁共振脑成像和(B)对奖励和动机过程的基本理解方面的最新进展意味着，现在研究这些过程在精神和神经疾病中是如何受到影响的时机已经成熟。我将研究精神病患者和帕金森氏症患者，并检查他们的冷漠和精神病症状在多大程度上与动机和奖励处理系统的异常有关。更多的了解将有助于患者，将使现有的治疗方法得到更好的利用，并可能有助于开发新的治疗方法。

Motivation and the response to rewarding events are adversely affected in many psychiatric and neurological illnesses: many patients with psychosis or Parkinson‘s Disease (PD) are de-motivated and experience apathy. Also, patients with some illnesses, such young adults with psychosis, seem to be over motivated by irrelevant information, which they seem to find captivating. This can also happen in patients with PD, possibly secondary to medication. But very little is known about the precise cause of these motivational abnormalities at the brain level. One reason is why few studies have even tried to investigate these processes in patients is because, until very recently, the techniques and methods to study brain motivational processes in patients were underdeveloped. Recent advances in (a) MRI brain imaging, and (b) basic understanding of reward and motivational processing, have meant that the time is now ripe to study how these processes are affected in psychiatric and neurological illness. I will study patients with psychosis, and PD, and examine to what extent their apathy and psychotic symptoms can be related to abnormalities in motivational and reward processing systems. Greater understanding will be helpful to patients, will enable better use of existing treatments and could help develop new treatments.