Initial Research of Dissociation

Project Gist

Interdisciplinary research on a psychiatric symptom ‘dissociation’

Keywords

Dissociative disorder, Psychiatric disorders, Philosophy of science, Neuroscience

Background and Purpose

Dissociative disorder (DD), characterised by psychological symptoms like amnesia and hallucination and by physical ones of unknown cause, accounts for about 1-3% of the population and leads to higher rate of suicide than depressive disorder. Since DD can still be diagnosed only by interview despite the prevalence and severity, objective diagnosis is required for the understanding its pathophysiology and creation of biological therapy. From different viewpoints, studies on DD may have a novel influencea big problem in philosophy of science“how mind and body are linked”as the symptoms are not always fixed but may be transient orfluctuating

Project Achievements

Internal and international collaboration with different institutes facilitated the improvement of MR spectroscopy (MRS), a classical technique of MRI which can measure concentration of metabolic substrates. We applied MRS for certain areas of the brain from volunteers showing different extent of dissociation and found that some substrates have a significant correlation with clinical scores of dissociation. This result raised a possibility that the tendency of dissociation could be objectively quantified. Also the fact that brain regions possibly related to dissociation has inadequate information of detail microstructure as well as function, encouraged us to take an anatomical approach using postmortem human brains

Future Prospects

We spent this year on research group organisation and preliminary experiments. We aim in the following years to extend the experiences to the patients with dissociation, similar diseases, and disorders that should be differentially diagnosed, and finally to create the animal model. I hope that Japan will be a global hub for dissociation research in future.

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Principal Investigator