Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Antipsychotic medications are necessary for the treatment of mental illnesses when psychosis occurs. However, the underlying mechanism of these drugs is not fully understood because of the paucity of comparison between antipsychotic drugs and placebo for ethical reasons. Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) is one of the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) sequences that noninvasively measures brain metabolite concentration, which has been used as a neural marker. In the proposed research, we will evaluate how the use of olanzapine (antipsychotic medication) is related to brain metabolite level change in comparison with placebo using the multi-centre Study of the Pharmacotherapy of Psychotic Depression (STOP-PD) II dataset. This project will also examine diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), another type of MRI scan to measure structural connectivity in brain networks. We will see the relationships between the metabolite concentration and the corresponding fiber density at a set of brain regions. This study is expected to clarify the effects of antipsychotic medications on brain metabolite level change. The discoveries made in this project will directly address the gap in neurobiological knowledge on the effects of antipsychotic medications on the brain while also providing useful biomarker data that may be associated with treatment outcomes.