2016 NHMRC/RG Menzies Alumni and Lead Researcher Dr Alexis Whitton, is successfully contributing to the research and early detection of bipolar disorder.
Dr Whitton completed a combined Masters in Clinical Psychology and PhD at UNSW. She worked with a team at the Black Dog Institute to develop Australia’s first fully automated web and mobile phone intervention for depression, which now has over 120,000 users worldwide. Through this research, she noted that many treatments were ineffective for depressed individuals with prominent anhedonia – a symptom characterised by a reduced ability to experience pleasure.
To better understand why this might be, Dr Whitton took up a postdoctoral position at a world-leading affective neuroscience laboratory at Harvard Medical School in Boston, funded by an NHMRC Menzies Fellowship. Using neuroimaging to study brain reward pathways, Dr Whitton’s work yielded important insights into the cognitive and neurobiological processes that underpin anhedonia, along with two novel pharmacological treatments that show promise in normalising aberrant brain reward function. Her research has been published in leading journals in the field, including Nature Medicine, Brain, and Biological Psychiatry.
The recently named, 2021 Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science (APS), Dr Whitton leads a specialist research program that aims to improve the effectiveness of treatments for depression. She does this by analysing how health care professionals can better match patients to specific treatments so that outcome is more likely to be effective the first time around.
“New findings emerging from the work I conducted at Harvard Medical School as part of my Menzies Fellowship showed that elevated levels of brain glutamate (an important neurotransmitter) could potentially indicate the presence of bipolar disorder in people seeking treatment for depression,” Whitton said.
In further development, the research team are conducting in depth research to determine whether measuring glutamate using brain imaging can help to improve the early detection of bipolar disorder.
Dr Whitton expressed, “This is important work given that it often takes people with bipolar disorder several years and multiple rounds of ineffective treatment before they receive a correct diagnosis”.
“The support I received from the Menzies Foundation has been pivotal to my career. It helped me launch an innovative line of research that has provided new insights into how we can improve the early diagnosis and treatment of bipolar disorder,” Dr Whitton says.
You can read more on Dr Alexis Whitton’s research efforts here