David Berhanu is a student at the Faculty of Medicine and an Assistant at the Institute of Anatomy and, on Research Day, he presented a Poster that was the result of a research work he began as an exchange student in the United States and eventually became the object of study of his Master’s thesis, supervised by Professor Lia Lucas Neto.

David chose to focus his study on the issue of schizophrenia and the development of psychotic episodes in a sample of patients with the 22q11.2 deletion syndrome, considering that up to 30% of the population with this genetic condition develops schizophrenia.

After choosing the subject of his research, he needed to find the right approach. So, he decided to study the change in the volume of the cortex and the amygdala underlying the occurrence of psychotic episodes. The objective was to check whether this change in the volume of the cortex occurred before the psychotic episodes. In order to do that, he used imaging data to study the ratio between the volumes of the cortex and the amygdala (a nucleus located in the subcortical region, responsible for processing emotions).

It had already been proved that there were changes in the volume of the amygdala in patients with schizophrenia, but there was a need to ascertain if these changes occurred before the onset of psychotic symptoms and if it was possible to predict who would develop the disease. It was possible to conclude that the lower the ratio between the volumes of the cortex and the amygdala, the higher the risk of developing schizophrenia.

This work was published in 2017 under the title Cortical-amygdala volumetric ratios predict onset of symptoms of psychosis in 22q11.2 deletion syndrome.

The next step will be to develop this research using a larger population sample.

Cristina Bastos

Editorial team