When a light goes out, people often assume the bulb is blown. But what if something has actually happened to its electrical wires?
This is how PhD candidate Sara Crellin framed her research into bipolar disorder.
“A light bulb can’t shine if the cable is broken,” she says.
A brain is made up of a “hundred billion” neurons (the light bulbs), with “100 trillion connections” between them (the cables); the neurons do not work in isolation, Sara says. Meanwhile, the majority of neuroscience surrounding psychiatric disorders and drug treatments focuses on the neurons.
She believes her research is something of a first.
“No one had done a comprehensive investigation as to whether the treatments in bipolar, particularly lithium, could alter the way that electricity flows down a cable.”
It had been well established in clinical neuroimaging studies that the integrity of cables of those with bipolar disorder is compromised, but she could not find evidence of someone looking at this topic on a pharmacological or electrophysiological level in the lab, she says.
Sara developed a new preparation to examine cable functioning, which she started developing during her undergrad. Looking at the cables while using her preparation was “surprisingly novel” approach, she says.
The regions of the brain associated with emotion and cognition are two prominent regions that are affected by bipolar disorder. They’re also quite far apart, meaning there is a lot of “cable mileage” which could be failing to function properly.
Sara says 2.1 per cent of New Zealanders are affected by bipolar disorder, but 3.6 per cent of Pacifica and 4.6 per cent of Māori are affected, making it “very disproportionate”.
Sara has always wanted to conduct research in field of clinical psychiatry to help improve treatments and diagnostics.
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“Psychiatry is, I feel, one of the few fields where the brain isn’t quite treated like an organ with cellular dysfunction. It’s still very subjective.”