Matthew Hearing, an associate professor of biomedical sciences at Marquette University’s college of health sciences, has received a $2.4 million research project grant from the National Institute’s of Health’s National Institute of Mental Health to study treatments for stress-related neuropsychiatric conditions such as major depressive disorder.
Hearing and his team will test whether “chronic unpredictable stress produces sex-dependent neurological changes that result in deficits in behavioral/cognitive flexibility, and that this reflects impaired function of areas of the brain such as the prefrontal cortex,” according to Marquette’s Thursday news release.
Deficits in cognitive flexibility can be evident in an individual through their ineffective problem-solving and “negative thought patterns that come at the expense of healthy coping responses,” according to the news release.
“Flexible behavior — the ability to adapt behavior in response to changing environmental contingencies — is a critical component of everyday life,” Hearing said. “Our preliminary findings indicate that prolonged exposure to unpredictable psychosocial stress produces deficits in strategy shifting, or ‘cognitive flexibility in mice,’ akin to those observed in people with major depressive disorder. Interestingly, similar to human populations, not all mice exhibit deficits in flexibility, which may help to identify risk factors related to individual susceptibility versus resilience to stress.”
For this project, Hearing will also work with former colleague John Mantsch, who is now a professor and chair of pharmacology and toxicology at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Hearing and Mantsch also received a $1.7 million grant in 2020 from the National Institutes of Health for a neuroscientific study on substance use disorder in women.
“This is an exciting opportunity for Dr. Hearing and his team to expand on their groundbreaking neuroscientific research on mechanisms underlying mental disorders,” said William Cullinan, dean of Marquette’s College of Health Sciences. “This particular approach has strong implications for understanding and treating a range of debilitating stress-related neuropsychiatric conditions.”
