Grant: Operating Grant: SickKids-CIHR-IHDCYH New Investigator Grants

<html> <head> </head> <body> Approximately 1.2 million children and adolescents in Canada are affected by mental illness, and lessthan 20 percent of them receive appropriate treatment. Unfortunately, diagnosis and treatment ofpsychiatric disorders is still very different from medical issues such as heart problems or cancer. Thereare no biological tests that doctors can order when they are taking care of children with psychiatricsymptoms. This leads to delayed and confusing diagnoses, frustrating treatment trials, and pooroutcomes for youth. As a child psychiatrist and neuroimaging researcher, my research aims to change this. The goal of mylab is to study the brain in ways that are more &#8220;real-to-life&#8221; so that we can see patterns of brain functionthat capture the issues that children have in daily life. Instead of using conventional tasks during brainscans (e.g., pushing a button when a green arrow flashes), we use complex, naturalistic stimuli likemovies. Our past work using movies has shown that we get better and more data, especially withchildren. The brain signals we measure are also generally stronger and more reliable, which is crucialwhen we are trying to identify clinical differences in the brain. This grant uses movies to study brain function in youth who have childhood-onset obsessive-compulsivedisorder (CO-OCD). CO-OCD is a serious form of OCD that has major consequences for children, familiesand healthcare systems. We have made a new movie specifically to study CO-OCD. First, we plan to testthe movie in an online study to see how youth respond. Then we will use the movie in a brain imagingstudy. The goal is to identify brain differences that are important for CO-OCD in general, and that matterat the individual participant level. These findings could become a tool for doctors to use when caring foryouth with CO-OCD. </body> </html>