Neuropsychiatric diseases

As an animal model for neuropsychiatric diseases we use, among other things, prepulse inhibition (PPI) of the acoustically induced startle response. This is a measure of an automatic mechanism of response suppression in the brain ("sensorimotor gating"), which is reduced in some neuropsychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia and Tourette's syndrome. Animal experimentally induced PPI deficits are therefore considered valid models to study these disorders. In particular, we are investigating the effects of DBS on pharmacologically induced PPI deficits as well as on other cognitive and emotional disorders associated with these deficits. We have already shown that the neuronal activity of pharmacologically treated rats resembles that of patients with Tourette's, and that DBS of clinically relevant brain regions improves both PPI deficits and neuronal changes. Here, too, we use the information obtained to further develop adaptive stimulation strategies.

Another approach deals with the neuronal processing of relevant and irrelevant environmental information. This is also disturbed in certain neuropsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia. As a behavioral paradigm, we use the so-called three-class oddball paradigm, in which the rat must ignore a frequent standard tone and a rare distractor tone, but must react to a rare target tone with a behavioral response. During the behavioral paradigm, the rats' neural activity is recorded via previously implanted electrodes and, among other things, the effect of certain neuropharmaceuticals on the neural processing of relevant and irrelevant information is investigated.