UMD Research Team Awarded $3.4 Million to Study Root Causes of Anxiety, Depression

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has awarded a $3.4 million grant to the University of Maryland to support research aimed at understanding the catalysts for pathological anxiety and depression, particularly in college students.

A growing body of data shows that these disorders impose a staggering burden on public health and the global economy, making them an ever-increasing concern for clinicians, researchers and public policy makers. While anxiety disorders are the most common family of mental illnesses in the United States and Europe—and often contribute to the development of depression and substance abuse—existing treatments are inconsistently effective and associated with significant side effects.

The new grant will support an international team of researchers, led by Assistant Professor Alex Shackman in the UMD Department of Psychology, who plan to use state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques, clinical measures and smartphone technology to clarify the mechanisms that lead to the development and recurrence of anxiety disorders and depression—a critical step in identifying new, brain-based strategies for preventing or treating these illnesses.

“These disorders contribute to the suffering and misery of millions of patients and their loved ones all over the world, including many students at Maryland and other universities,” Dr. Shackman said. “The pipeline for developing new drugs is stalled. It’s imperative that we identify the brain circuits that underlie extreme anxiety and get a better handle on their relevance to changes in mood and function in the real world.”

One of the novel goals of the project is to use smartphone technology to continuously monitor the feelings, behavior, stress and social support experienced by college freshmen as they move on to their sophomore, junior and even senior years at the university. Researchers will then compare those behaviors and experiences with measures of brain function collected during students’ freshmen years.

“We hope this will allow us to discover patterns of brain function that predict who develops anxiety disorders, who grapples with severe depression and who might engage in harmful behaviors such as excessive drinking to cope with stress,” Dr. Shackman said. “The smartphone data could also help us to develop better mobile apps for treating or even preventing these disorders before relationships are strained and before performance in school or the workplace really starts to suffer.”

Dr. Shackman noted the data may also lead to new targets for drug development, improved models of mental illness and clues to help identify high-risk individuals before they become sick in order to guide them into prevention programs. 

Other members of the international investigative team include Dr. Jason Smith in the Department of Psychology at UMD; Drs. Greg Hancock and Nathan Fox in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology at UMD; Dr. Luiz Pessoa, Director of the Maryland Neuroimaging Center; Dr. Todd Kashdan in the Department of Psychology at George Mason University; and Dr. Matthias Gamer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Würzburg, Germany.

Published on Mon, Apr 4, 2016 - 4:07PM