Symposium: MMN as a translational biomarker of psychosis: from bench-to-bedside-to-real-world community settings
Thursday, Sep 10, 2015
9:30-10:30
Hörsaal 3
The “Other Side” of translational biomarker development: taking MMN out of academic labs and into real-world settings to improve our understanding and treatment of psychosis
Department of Psychiatry, UCSD, La Jolla, United States
glight@ucsd.edu
Advances in neuroscience have transformed our understanding of impaired and spared brain functions in psychotic illnesses. Despite substantial progress, few if any laboratory tests have graduated to clinics to inform diagnoses, guide treatments, and monitor treatment response. Providers must rely on careful behavioral observation and interview techniques to make inferences about patients’ inner experiences and then secondary deductions about impacted neural systems. Development of more effective treatments has also been hindered by a lack of translational quantitative biomarkers that can span the brain-behavior-treatment knowledge gap. This presentation will show that Mismatch Negativity (MMN) offers promise for improving our understanding and treatment of psychotic illnesses. MMN is sensitive to and/or predicts response to some pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic interventions and accounts for substantial portions of variance in clinical, cognitive, and psychosocial functioning in schizophrenia. Most recently, MMN has been validated for use in large-scale multi-site clinical studies of schizophrenia supporting the view that this measure can be “scaled up” for use in non-academic community treatment centers. These attributes suggest that MMN can contribute to future personalized biomarker-guided treatment strategies for psychosis.