Novel treatment can be an improvement of existing therapies, for example by making the treatment better suited for specific subgroups like women of different life phases of for people suffering from specific symptoms. Novel treatments also contain new strategies, like cognitive interventions, hormonal augmentation, digital interventions or repurposing drugs.
To design optimal strategies for successful intervention, better understanding is crucial. For this purpose, we perform observational studies with different techniques like MRI, speech and language analyses, questionnaires and cognitive tests. Understanding basic mechanisms behind symptoms and syndromes that affect the brain, helps to identify new biomarkers and surrogate end points for research and clinical use.
An important aim of our center is to educate researchers and clinicians in the use of techniques to study the human brain and conduct treatment trials. We welcome many new people each year as all stages of their career.
Our center has a clinical trial facility for multi-center phase 3 and 4 studies, specialized in psychotic disorders (insert link to group Winter). We also provide facilities for phase 1 and 2 studies involving different types of MRI measurements and complex analyses (insert link to facility). Our center is active in science communication and outreach, involving formal and informal activities.
As the brain is still the terra incognita of the human body, better understanding is an urgent need, as this knowledge enables us to develop adequate treatment options. Our team has contributed to the understanding of cross-diagnostic symptoms like hallucinations, apathy, rumination, suicidality, and delusions. This knowledge found its way into scientific articles, standard textbooks, popular scientific books. We also communicate directly with patients and their family.
Our work has improved the treatment for women with psychosis and provided guidelines on how to taper antipsychotic medication. Our direct collaborators are scientists of other disciplines (microbiologists, dieticians, linguists, etc), industry and pharmacy, patient organisations like MIND, Gamian and Anoiksis, hospitals, the Dutch Brain Foundation and Nationaal Plan Hoofdzaken.
The Netherlands Brain Initiative, is a collaborative Dutch initiative to stimulate research towards improving quaility of life of people living with mental- and brain disorders.
We strive to further improve treatment options and implement our results directly to clinics or to clinicians by teaching at several levels of health care education. An important future goal is to accurately predict psychotic relapse and other mental crises, to create a window of opportunity to intervene and prevent dangerous situations.
