The development of an early-warning test could drastically help those young people most at risk of developing severe mental illness, researchers claim.
A team of psychologists and psychiatrists at the University of Glasgow, Scotland has received £1 million of funding from the Medical Research Council (MRC) to begin research on a brainwave ’fingerprint’ which could be used to help identify young people at risk of developing serious mental illness.
Researchers are currently looking to recruit 100 volunteers aged between 16 and 35 for the project which will measure their brain activity and examine changes in their mental state for a period of up to two years.
According to the researchers, the Youth Mental Health Risk and Resilience Study (YouR-Study) will use magnetoencephalography (MEG), a brain imaging technique unique to the university in Scotland, to examine a specific set of brainwaves known to be involved in cognitive functions.
The researchers said that one of the main aims of the project is to develop an early-warning system capable of identifying people at high risk of developing psychosis before they fully manifest the symptoms, such as hallucinations or delusions.
YouR-Study will be led by Peter Uhlhaas of the University of Glasgow’s Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology.
“The study will be the first of its kind to use MEG to investigate links between neural oscillations and their synchronisation, which recent research has shown may well play a role in the development of psychosis,” Uhlhass said.
“MEG, which is similar to electroencephalography (EEG)uses very sensitive magnetometers to record magnetic fields produced by electrical currents occurring naturally in the brain, creating a sophisticated map of brain activity,” he added.