In the News

A “transformational” $6.4 million gift from Dallas couple Donald Test Jr., and his wife, Charlotte, who have a very personal connection to the devastating disease of schizophrenia, is supporting Vanderbilt Department of Psychiatry research and treatment into schizophrenia and related disorders.

Several members of the Vanderbilt Department of Psychiatry collaborated on an article focusing on attention deficits related to traumatic brain injury (TBI). The article, "Traumatic brain injury-related attention deficits: Treatment outcomes with lisdexamfetamine dimesylate (Vyvanse)," appears in an issue of the June 2014 publication Brain Injury. Brain Injury is the official research journal of the International Brain Injury Association (IBIA).

One of the challenges with treating psychiatric disorders is finding a way to study them outside of the human brain. When there is no fundamental understanding of how a disease works, it becomes that much harder to find comparable symptoms in an animal or cell. And when you’re working with diseases such as depression that have symptoms that are hard to objectively quantify, there’s an extra layer of complexity.

A new report released recently by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that almost 8 percent of Americans over age 12 have moderate to severe depression. The report, based on data from the National Center for Health Statistics, found depression is most prevalent among middle-age women aged 40 to 59 years old. In every age group, women were found to have the higher rate of depression than men. Teenage boys aged 12 to 17 and men over age 60 had the lowest rates of depression.

Findings in a Vanderbilt-led study could pave the way for a cure to drug addiction. The number-one reason people admit to using marijuana is to cope with anxiety and depression, Vanderbilt researchers said.  That's why they're taking the fight against addiction to the root of the problem inside the brain.

The Autism Treatment Network on Physical Health (AIR-P) recently awarded one of three research grants to Kevin Sanders, M.D., assistant professor of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry and medical director of the Treatment & Research Institute on Autism Spectrum Disorders (TRIAD) and the Fragile X Treatment Research Program.

Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder share common genetic underpinnings, Vanderbilt University investigators have discovered. The researchers combined high-resolution gene expression studies that show which genes are turned “on” or “off” with gene association data to reveal signaling pathways linked to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The findings, published in Molecular Psychiatry, implicate pathways involving lysosomes, which influence many cellular processes, and actin cytoskeleton remodeling in these psychiatric disorders.  

Researchers at Vanderbilt have been able to alter mouse behavior by silencing gene expression in interneurons, distinct populations of nerve cells that are the main regulators of brain circuits. Interneurons can be thought of as the “building blocks” to impact behavior. Researchers found that changing the expression of a gene in one interneuron population had the exact opposite molecular and behavioral effect compared to changing the same gene in another.  

Bowels, especially those that don’t function properly, are not a popular topic of conversation. Most of the 1.4 million Americans with inflammatory bowel disease — Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis — suffer in silence. But scientists are making exciting progress in understanding the causes of these conditions and in developing more effective therapies. And affected individuals have begun to speak up to let others know that they are not alone.

Recognizing the signs of a brewing anxiety disorder Sixteen-year-old Hannah is a picture-perfect Middle Tennessee teenager. A straight-A student, beautiful, active and musically talented, she starred in her high school’s spring musical. Hannah (not her real name) hid a brewing anxiety disorder so well that even her mother had no idea she was becoming incapacitated by it—until she came home from a movie with her boyfriend last spring and quietly said that she had thought about committing suicide that night.