MGH Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging 2017 | Page 32

Daphne Holt
Among the new research tackling
these problems is an ongoing study,
by investigators at the Martinos
Center for Biomedical Imaging at
Massachusetts General Hospital, to
develop an objective, quantitative
means to measure what are known
clinically as ‘negative’ symptoms.
This is one of the great unmet needs
in treating schizophrenia. When
people think of the disease they
tend to think of ‘positive’ symptoms
like hallucinations and delusions,
which have over the years come to
dominate popular depictions and
public perceptions of schizophrenia.
But the negative symptoms, those
that involve an impairment of moti-
vation and action … these are in fact
the most disabling.
Which is why the recent research is
so invaluable. “An objective method
would go a long way toward helping
us find better treatments for these
symptoms,” says Daphne Holt,
a psychiatrist at Massachusetts
General Hospital and an investiga-
tor in the Center. “The shocking
reality is that, even after decades of
intensive testing of potential novel
treatments for negative symptoms,
at the moment, there are no effective
treatments available for them.”
Holt has been exploring a particu-
lar, often crippling aspect of these
symptoms: social withdrawal.
People typically understand this
to mean not wanting to be around
others, but it’s more than just that.
Social withdrawal also involves
an inability to read social cues or
to understand the perspectives of
others. As a result it can prove one
of the most devastating components
of the disease—especially because
it can lead to the person having
difficulty holding down a job, for
example, or maintaining many
relationships, the kinds of things we
think of as part of having a normal,
fulfilling life.
But what accounts for this? What
gears and cogs in the brain are either
turning or not turning to cause social
withdrawal and its often debilitat-
ing effects? Researchers have a few
ideas. Over the past several years
Holt has been studying a model of
social dysfunction in schizophrenia
that proposes a relationship between
this and very basic processes in the
brain: sensory-motor functioning.
One of the more prominent lines of
thinking about schizophrenia today,
the model suggests that many of
the things we view as wrong with
The researchers may have found something of a holy
grail in the management of social dysfunction: a neural
mechanism that can be specifically targeted by novel
treatment approaches
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