Philipp Ritter from the department of psychiatry at the Faculty of Medicine was successful with his application on “Neural correlates of cognitive impairment in bipolar disorder”. He will work together with colleagues from the Institute of Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience at King’s and the Institute of Acoustics and Speech Communication at TUD investigating the longitudinal trajectories and neural correlates of cognitive impairment in bipolar disorder.
While cognitive impairment is a major determinant of educational attainment and quality of life in persons with bipolar disorder, it is a poorly researched area. It has recently become clear that there are highly heterogenous trajectories of cognitive ability from no impairment at all to a highly neuroprogressive course comparable to schizophrenia. The underlying neural mechanisms, however, remain uncertain.
In order to understand better these mechanisms, the project will use repeat EEG, TMS-EEG, sleep-EEG and state of the art SV2A-PET-scanning. To this end, the group will leverage the specific expertise on bipolar disorder and advanced electrophysiological methods at TUD with the unique expertise on research in/treatment of cognitive impairment and advanced PET imaging methods at the IoPPN.
Furthermore, Philipp Ritter and his colleagues will also propose to develop novel neurostimulatory methods such as closed-loop-auditory-stimulation (CLAS) during sleep in conjunction. The efforts should result in a joint application to a renowned funding body on the UK side.