Funds are requested to purchase a mini-computer system to support the requirements of the Biostatistics Unit of the Psychiatry Service at the Massachusetts General Hospital for data analysis. This unit provides statistical planning, guidance, data processing, and analysis for several large PHS supported projects at the MGH and elsewhere at the Harvard Medical School. The proposed computer system would centralize and streamline the very large data processing and statistical analysis effort now being conducted off-site through time-sharing arrangements. The availability of the hardware would make it possible to apply planned computer-intensive analytic methods to existing datasets, whose size and complexity have made the planned analyses prohibitively expensive under the current arrangements. The availability of the system would enable those PHS projects to concentrate resources on development of new analytic approaches, with the freedom to conduct analyses that require several billions of instruction steps, including genetic modeling and resampling methods as applied to multivariate statistical models. The projects to be supported include: a multi-institutional follow- up and family genetic study of affective illness, a follow-up study of eating disorders, a multi-study program project investigating the anatomic, physiologic, and psychiatric basis of pain, a two- site randomized clinical trial of two lithium dose regimens in prevention of relapse in long-term maintenance of manic depressive patients, a follow-up of borderline personality disorder and schizotypal disorders, a follow-up of juvenile onset (insulin dependent) diabetes, a follow-up of children at risk for affective disorders, a long-term epidemiologic study of the relationship between perinatal complications and psychiatric and neurologic outcomes in adults, a follow-up of affectively ill geriatric patients, a family study of attention deficit disorder, a study of the outcomes and risk factors involved in child abuse/neglect court cases, and a study of dementia secondary to HTLV-III infection.
