Dr Iain Perkes was awarded $20,000 in the 2018 round of UNSW Medicine Neuroscience, Mental Health and Addiction Theme and SPHERE Clinical Academic Group (CAG) Collaborative Research Seed Funding for the project: Pathophysiology of Tourette syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder in children: a decision-neuroscience and magnetic resonance imaging investigation.
Name: Dr Iain Perkes
Position/s:
NHMRC Scholar, School of Psychology, UNSW
Senior Lecturer, School of Psychiatry, UNSW
Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist, Sydney Children’s Hospital Network
Research Fellow, Black Dog Institute
How has the Neuroscience, Mental Health and Addiction Theme and CAG enabled you to develop your research interests?
This seed funding enables the project which forms part of my NHMRC supported PhD. The project also supports several Independent Learning Projects (ILP) for UNSW medical students. Immediate implementation gains include children with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) being assessed with gold-standard measures and that assessment being communicated to their referring clinicians. The methods developed have potential to identify patients earlier and unlock novel treatments.
Your project, Pathophysiology of Tourette syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder in children: a decision-neuroscience and magnetic resonance imaging investigation was successful in the 2018 round of Theme and CAG collaborative research seed funding. Can you please tell us about the project?
Our group’s previous decision-making test results of adolescents with OCD will be compared to younger children with OCD and Tourette syndrome. This study will compare a group of children with OCD to those without and include siblings of the children with OCD to learn about risk factors for the development of OCD. Participants will earn rewards on a computer game and task performance will be analysed relative to brain imaging results.
What impact do you imagine the project will have?
OCD is one of the most disabling conditions in the world. People with OCD typically have symptoms for 17 years before they receive treatment. And in half of all cases don’t fully respond to available treatments.
The need to understand OCD brain mechanisms to diagnose earlier and develop new treatments led our group to scan the brains of teenagers with OCD while they made decisions. The results showed that they had difficulty using predictive cues and changes to improve their choices. These impairments may be an early vulnerability and indicator for the development of OCD and could guide early intervention, prevention and novel treatment discovery.
By determining if these decision-making impairments are present in younger children with Tourette syndrome and OCD we plan to use these tests to detect vulnerability, treat earlier and close the 17-year gap. And, by better understanding the mechanisms of disease, new behavioural treatments may be developed.
How will the project support new collaborations?
This project links, for the first time, the UNSW Decision Neuroscience Lab, UNSW School of Psychiatry, Neuroscience Research Australia, the Black Dog Institute, and Sydney Children’s Hospital Network (SCHN). SCHN will refer children with Tourette syndrome and OCD to the Black Dog Institute where they will be assessed using gold-standard diagnostic measures. UNSW Psychiatry will provide input and oversight to the clinical phenotyping of patients at their relatives. Neuroscience Research Australia will support imaging design and analysis. The UNSW Decision Neuroscience Lab will provide design and analysis of the behavioural neuroscience experiments.