Diana Perkins | |
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Academic background | |
Alma mater | |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Psychiatrist |
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Institutions | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
Diana O. Perkins is an American professor at the University of North Carolina's (UNC) School of Medicine where she teaches psychiatry;she is a fellow with outreach roles. [1] Her research involves early diagnosis and treatment of schizophrenia. She is noted for publishing a study that demonstrated that using a polygenic risk score (PRS) based on data from genome-wide association studies improved the psychosis risk prediction in persons meeting clinical high-risk criteria. [2]
Perkins' undergraduate work was completed at the University of Maryland in Psychology and Biochemistry;she received her Doctor of Medicine at University of Maryland School of Medicine. She completed a graduate degree in Epidemiology from UNC. [3]
Psychosis is a condition of the mind that results in difficulties determining what is real and what is not real. Symptoms may include delusions and hallucinations,among other features. Additional symptoms are incoherent speech and behavior that is inappropriate for a given situation. There may also be sleep problems,social withdrawal,lack of motivation,and difficulties carrying out daily activities. Psychosis can have serious adverse outcomes.
Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by continuous or relapsing episodes of psychosis. Major symptoms include hallucinations,delusions,and disorganized thinking. Other symptoms include social withdrawal,decreased emotional expression,and apathy. Symptoms typically develop gradually,begin during young adulthood,and in many cases never become resolved. There is no objective diagnostic test;diagnosis is based on observed behavior,a psychiatric history that includes the person's reported experiences,and reports of others familiar with the person. To be diagnosed with schizophrenia,symptoms and functional impairment need to be present for six months (DSM-5) or one month (ICD-11). Many people with schizophrenia have other mental disorders,especially substance use disorders,depressive disorders,anxiety disorders,and obsessive–compulsive disorder.
Clozapine is a psychiatric medication and is the first atypical antipsychotic to be discovered. It is primarily used to treat people with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder who have had an inadequate response to two other antipsychotics or who have been unable to tolerate other drugs due to extrapyramidal side effects. It is also used for the treatment of psychosis in Parkinson's disease. Clozapine is regarded as the gold-standard treatment when most other medications are ineffective and its use is recommended by multiple international treatment guidelines,after resistance to two other antipsychotic medications.
Schizoaffective disorder is a mental disorder characterized by abnormal thought processes and an unstable mood. This diagnosis requires symptoms of both schizophrenia and a mood disorder:either bipolar disorder or depression. The main criterion is the presence of psychotic symptoms for at least two weeks without any mood symptoms. Schizoaffective disorder can often be misdiagnosed when the correct diagnosis may be psychotic depression,bipolar I disorder,schizophreniform disorder,or schizophrenia. This is a problem as treatment and prognosis differ greatly for most of these diagnoses.
Postpartum psychosis(PPP),also known as puerperal psychosis or peripartum psychosis,involves the abrupt onset of psychotic symptoms shortly following childbirth,typically within two weeks of delivery but less than 4 weeks postpartum. PPP is a condition currently represented under "Brief Psychotic Disorder" in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,Volume V (DSM-V). Symptoms may include delusions,hallucinations,disorganized speech (e.g,incoherent speech),and/or abnormal motor behavior (e.g.,catatonia). Other symptoms frequently associated with PPP include confusion,disorganized thought,severe difficulty sleeping,variations of mood disorders (including depression,agitation,mania,or a combination of the above),as well as cognitive features such as consciousness that comes and goes (waxing and waning) or disorientation.
Barbara A. Cornblatt is Professor of Psychiatry and Molecular Medicine at Hofstra Northwell School of Medicine. She is known for her research on serious mental disorders,with a specific focus on psychosis and schizophrenia. Her efforts to find treatments to help youth with mental illness led to the development of the Recognition and Prevention Program,which she founded in 1998.
Alexander Bogdan ("Bob") Niculescu,III is a Romanian born,San Diego,California,educated and trained scientist and physician. He is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis,Indiana,Director of the Laboratory of Neurophenomics,and an Attending Psychiatrist and R&D Investigator at the Indianapolis VA Medical Center. Considered the inventor of Convergent Functional Genomics (CFG),he is a prominent figure in the field of personalized medicine in psychiatry. His early contributions to the psychiatric genetics field include identification of candidate genes,pathways and mechanisms for bipolar disorder using convergent studies In particular,his work and that of his collaborators has focused attention on circadian clock genes as core components of mood regulation Since these contributions,his research program has expanded to include similar work on schizophrenia alcoholism and stress disorders leading to the identification of panels of DNA and RNA markers for disease risk prediction and severity of illness. Niculescu pioneered early on the view that psychiatric disorders are genetically complex,heterogeneous,and overlapping,requiring gene level integration of data followed by pathway analyses. The cumulative combinatorics of common variants and environment model he described for bipolar and other complex disorders based on empirical data,is being increasingly supported by evidence from other groups working on psychiatric and non-psychiatric disorders. More recently,he has proposed a comprehensive unifying model (Mindscape) for conceptualizing how the mind works. His most recent work has focused on understanding and developing genomic and clinical risk predictors for suicide,a preventable tragedy and increasing public health problem.
Celso Arango is a psychiatrist who has worked as a clinician,researcher,and educator in psychiatry and mental health,notably in the field of child and adolescent psychiatry,psychosis,and mental health promotion.
Cathryn Lewis is Professor of Genetic Epidemiology and Statistics at King's College London. She is Head of Department at the Social,Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre,Institute of Psychiatry,Psychology and Neuroscience.
Pamela Sklar was an American psychiatrist and neuroscientist. She was Chair of the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and professor of psychiatry,neuroscience,and genetic and genomic sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She was also chief of the Division of Psychiatric Genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Sklar is known for her large-scale gene discovery studies in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and for making some of the first statistically meaningful gene identifications in both mental illnesses.
In genetics,a polygenic score (PGS),also called a polygenic index (PGI),polygenic risk score (PRS),genetic risk score,or genome-wide score,is a number that summarizes the estimated effect of many genetic variants on an individual's phenotype,typically calculated as a weighted sum of trait-associated alleles. It reflects an individual's estimated genetic predisposition for a given trait and can be used as a predictor for that trait. In other words,it gives an estimate of how likely an individual is to have a given trait only based on genetics,without taking environmental factors into account. Polygenic scores are widely used in animal breeding and plant breeding due to their efficacy in improving livestock breeding and crops. In humans,polygenic scores are typically generated from genome-wide association study (GWAS) data.
Heather Clare Whalley is a Scottish scientist. She is a senior research fellow in Neuroimaging at the Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences,University of Edinburgh.,and is an affiliate member of the Centre for Genomic and Experimental Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. Her main focus of research is on the mechanisms underlying the development of major psychiatric disorders using the latest genomic and neuroimaging approaches.
Bhramar Mukherjee is an Indian-American biostatistician,data scientist,professor and researcher. She is the John D. Kalbfleisch Collegiate Professor and the Chair of Department of Biostatistics,a professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan. She serves as the associate director for Quantitative Data Sciences at University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center. She has served as the past Chair for Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) for a three-year term 2019-2021.
Impute.me. was an open-source non-profit web application that allowed members of the public to use their data from direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic tests to calculate polygenic risk scores (PRS) for complex diseases and cognitive and personality traits. In July 2022,Lasse Folkerson,initiator and operator of impute.me,took the website offline.
Danielle Hairston is an American psychiatrist who is Director of Residency Training in the Department of Psychiatry at Howard University College of Medicine,and a practicing psychiatrist in the Division of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore,Maryland. Hairston is also the Scientific Program Chair for the Black Psychiatrists of America and the President of the American Psychiatric Association's Black Caucus.
Diana Prata is a Portuguese neuroscientist who concentrates on identifying the biological basis of human behaviour. She reported the first evidence that schizophrenia-risk genes can also predispose to bipolar disorder and has also investigated reasons why people respond differently to antipsychotic medications. She is head of the Biomedical Neuroscience Lab at the University of Lisbon.
Diana Lynn Miglioretti is an American biostatistician specializing in the availability and effectiveness of breast cancer screening and in radiation hazards from medical imaging;she has also studied connections between Down syndrome and leukemia. She is Dean's Professor of Public Health Sciences and head of the biostatistics division in the UC Davis School of Medicine. She co-leads the U.S. Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium.
Robert Keers was a British psychologist conducting innovative research on individual differences in mental health problems with a specific focus on psychiatric genetics.
Benedicto Crespo Facorro is a psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry with the School of Medicine at the Hospital Universitario Virgen del Rocío,Universidad de Sevilla,in Seville. Facorro is notable for his research work in the area of early psychosis and schizophrenia and for having led one of the first early psychosis early intervention programs in Spain (PAFIP) for over two decades. Facorro is one of the only four researchers from Spain listed in the authors' collaborative network of the authors that published the greatest number of research papers on antipsychotics and schizophrenia over the last 50 years.
Carrie Elyse Bearden is an American psychologist and academic. She is a professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine,University of California,Los Angeles,and Director of the UCLA Center for the Assessment and Prevention of Prodromal States,a clinical research program for youth at high risk for psychotic disorders. She is most known for her research taking a ‘genetics first’approach to study brain mechanisms underlying the development of serious mental illness. Her work has identified biological convergence between genetically and clinically defined high-risk populations.