WIP Special
Antoine Cherix, Jan Grohn
WIN Wednesday
Wednesday, 17 April 2024, 12pm to 1pm
Hybrid via Teams and in the Cowey Room, WIN Annexe
Hosted by Polytimi Frangou
Join via Teams
Identifying the neuroimaging fingerprint of hippocampal insulin resistance in depression: a pilot study
Presented by Antoine Cherix
Abstract: Depression is a leading cause of disability worldwide and a major public health issue but little is known about the etiological factors and its underlying pathophysiology. Recently, metabolic syndrome (MetS) and insulin resistance (IR) in particular, have been proposed as potential causes of a subset of depression due to their high co-morbidity. The hippocampus is a well-recognised insulin-sensitive tissue which might be key in this pathophysiological process, but tools are lacking to assess insulin signalling efficiency non-invasively in the brain. Disrupting brain insulin signalling in mice allowed us to identify a neuroimaging fingerprint (using 1H, 31P and 13C-MRS) of insulin resistance in preclinical models of depression. We observed that a reduction of hippocampal lactate (end-product of glycolysis) and reduction of excitatory/inhibitory (E/I) balance (Glu/GABA) was linked with animal’s depressive-like behaviour.
We are now investigating whether a similar hippocampal ‘trace’ can be identified in a pilot group of participants with depression and known disruption of insulin signalling. To do so, we will conduct a cross-sectional pilot study using edited MRS at 7 Tesla in the hippocampus of people with depression and controls. We will test whether low levels of lactate and Glu/GABA can be detected in people with depression and whether they correlate with ‘systemic’ insulin resistance (HbA1C) and/or with specific cognitive/memory functions.
Overall, we anticipate that our findings will provide preliminary data to capture the role of IR in depression and bring forward a useful imaging fingerprint with high clinical potential in the field of psychiatry.
Learning Reward Distributions
Presented by Jan Grohn
Abstract: Recent work has shown that neural activity of tracks the full distribution of reward rather than just some summary statistics of it such as the mean and variance. We have devised tasks that allow us to reconstruct these learned distributions from behaviour and plan on linking this behaviour to 7T fMRI data.