Developing Longitudinal Research Methodologies for Neuroscience Studies in Mental Health

Cross-sectional research in psychiatry can only take us so far – in order to translate basic cognitive neuroscience research into valuable clinical tools, we need longitudinal studies that can gather the volume of data needed to make robust predictions.

Two key targets for this kind of research are predicting

1. which patients are most/least likely to respond to a given treatment – allowing for individualized treatment allocation, and predicting
2. who is likely to become unwell in the future – allowing us to intervene earlier

With the help of seed funding from the ISSF, Dr Gillan is pursuing new methodologies for this kind of research using web-based methods and lab-based longitudinal brain recording with electroencephalogram (EEG).