Research - The Group of Psychiatric Neuroscience

    

The Psychiatric Unit at the University Hospital of Bari hosts the Group of Psychiatric Neuroscience, which includes a team of psychiatrists, psychologists, biologists, geneticists, brain imagers, and residents in psychiatry. The group is led by Professor Giuseppe Blasi, and focuses its research on the investigation of the brain and of the biological mechanisms that predispose to the onset of brain disorders, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. To this aim, the Group of Psychiatric Neuroscience collects and analyzes clinical, environmental, neuropsychological, genetic, and brain imaging data. Imaging data are acquired using a high field MRI and an up-to-date equipment for Magnetoencephalography. Genetics and molecular biology studies are performed in a lab equipped for analysis of DNA and mRNA expression, proteomics, and cell cultures. All data acquired by the Psychiatric Neuroscience Group are integrated and analyzed, also with data mining procedures, for a general understanding of the mechanisms of illness, the development of new and personalized pharmacological treatments, as well as for the identification of risk factors for the onset of psychiatric disorders.

All data are acquired from people who voluntarily join the studies, including patients with schizophrenia, patients with bipolar disorder, healthy siblings of patients with these psychiatric disorders, and healthy individuals. Data acquired from healthy subjects are crucial for the understanding of the mechanisms of normal brain functioning.

The studies performed by the Psychiatric Neuroscience Group have been published in several papers published in the world's leading journals in the fields of psychiatry and neuroscience.

Neuroimaging and biostatistics laboratory
Molecular psychiatry and genetics laboratory

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published on 09/04/2018 ultima modifica 26/03/2021