The Clinical Services and Diagnostics Core of the proposed Center represents a unique resource that isorganized around the recruitment, characterization and rigorous diagnostic evaluation of first-episode,antipsychotic-naive schizophrenia and non-schizophrenia psychotic subjects, and healthy controls, and theacquisition of clinical data and diagnoses of subjects used in postmortem studies. Clinical research studiesconducted in the proposed Center will use multimodal electrophysiological methods, functional neuroimaging(fMRI) approaches (Project 5-Phillips), and a novel PET method (Project 6-Mathis) to test hypothesesregarding the relationships between cortical neuronal network activity, GABA neurotransmission andinformation processing deficits in schizophrenia. The Core integrates and coordinates the recruitment andassessment of subjects across projects within the proposed Center as well as for other funded collaborativeprojects to ensure that subjects are efficiently and productively engaged with a minimum redundancy ofactivities. The clinical and diagnostic expertise of Core faculty and staff is also utilized in the characterizationof the clinical research diagnoses of individuals whose post-mortem brain specimens are used in Project 1-Lewis. The infrastructure of the Clinical Services and Diagnostics Core also serves as an educationalopportunity for young investigators to develop seed proposals to address questions relating to thepathophysiology of schizophrenia, and as a means to educate the practicing clinicians, students, and thegeneral public about advances in schizophrenia research.
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