Medial temporal lobe function and associative memory formation in schizophrenia

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Schizophrenia is a common and severe psychiatric illness. Our work aims to understand more about the causes of this illness.Recent studies have identified genes that are associated with risk for schizophrenia. These genes affect the cellular processes underlying learning and memory. We believe that alterations in simple learning processes can result in many of the problems seen in schizophrenia. We are therefore investigating how patients with schizophrenia and their relatives perform on basic learning tasks. We are also looking at their brain activity while carrying out these learning tasks using safe magentic resonance imaging (MRI) scanning technology to see if there are differences in brain activity between people with schizophrenia and healthy control participants.We are in addition directly investigating how specific genes associated with schizophrenia, such as a gene called Neuregulin-1, cause the illness. In particular we are studying the effects that these genes have on brain structure and function as well as on learning processes and the development of symptoms. We hope that understanding more about the basic causes of schizophrenia will eventually enable entirely novel treatments to be developed for this disabling mental health illness.