Centre for Complex Disorders

2003 Research Unit Award

Serious mental disorders affect thinking, mood and behaviour. The consequences are suffering, impaired function in daily life and yearly costs estimated in Canada at tens of billions of dollars. Like diabetes, hypertension and asthma, mental disorders are complex disorders, meaning there is no single gene mutation, experience or environmental effect that can be held responsible. With a history of focused but isolated research strategies that have failed to address these complexities, present day treatments for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are no more effective than those developed 50 years ago. There is also a lack of effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. The Centre for Complex Disorders (CCD) will seek integrative and transformative solutions to these health problems, with an initial focus on psychotic illnesses, such as bipolar disorder and some types of depression. These often begin in adolescence and cause those affected to lose contact with reality, and chronically become socially isolated and unable to work. The unit’s secondary focus will be complex disorders affecting memory in old age.

The CCD’s research program ranges from molecular genetic and protein research to clinical research and epidemiological and health services research aimed at developing evidence to inform health services policy development and planning. The interdisciplinary team will focus on four areas:

• Clinical research to improve understanding of early life events and neurodevelopmental factors that predispose individuals to develop psychosis. This includes efforts to develop sensitive biological markers, such as changes in cognitive performance or altered patterns of brain activity that may be used to assess effectiveness of drug therapy and also help in earlier identification of promising new drugs. It also includes validating information in administrative databases on patients with schizophrenia to facilitate epidemiological and health services studies aimed at improving health services policy development and planning.
• Understanding the fundamental cognitive disturbances in psychotic disorders (i.e. how disturbances in attention, learning and memory contribute to symptoms such as hallucinations, delusion and disturbed mood). The goal: to develop new information that will support the development of specific cognitive tests to predict onset of illness, relapse or progression to chronic states, and support clinical trials to determine the effects of drug treatment on improving cognitive function.
• Genetic variation research to identify and develop tests for gene variants that influence and can be used to predict risk for psychosis and treatment response.
• Neurobiology research to identify proteins involved in complex brain disorders, to understand how they interact and how interactions change when proteins are altered. The goal is to develop treatment strategies that will reverse protein abnormalities that contribute to psychotic disorders.

Completed award term September 2009.

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