Medial temporal lobe function and associative memory formation in schizophrenia

精神分裂症是一种常见而严重的精神疾病。我们的工作旨在更多地了解这种疾病的原因。最近的研究已经确定了与精神分裂症风险相关的基因。这些基因影响着学习和记忆的细胞过程。我们相信，简单学习过程的改变会导致精神分裂症中的许多问题。因此，我们正在调查精神分裂症患者及其亲属在基本学习任务中的表现。我们还使用安全磁共振成像（MRI）扫描技术观察他们在完成这些学习任务时的大脑活动，以观察精神分裂症患者和健康对照组参与者之间的大脑活动是否存在差异。此外，我们还在直接研究与精神分裂症相关的特定基因，比如一种名为神经调节蛋白-1的基因，是如何导致这种疾病的。特别是我们正在研究这些基因对大脑结构和功能的影响，以及对学习过程和症状发展的影响。我们希望更多地了解精神分裂症的基本原因，最终能够开发出针对这种致残精神健康疾病的全新治疗方法。

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.