Summary
Oliver Howes is Group Head and Professor of Molecular Psychiatry. His clinical work is as Consultant Psychiatrist at The Institute of Psychiatry/ Maudsley Hospital.
Contact: tel: +44 (0)20 8383 3298
Mental illnesses are a major cause of ill health and premature death. They account for four of the six leading causes of adult disability in the world and one in every ten hospital beds in the UK is allocated for the treatment of psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia.
“Our research focuses on understanding the causes of mental illnesses and improving their treatment using PET and other functional imaging techniques"
Current work in the group focuses on:
- Understanding the brain changes that lead to the development of psychotic disorders, using multi-modal imaging with PET and MRI
- Examining the effects of cannabis and other drugs on the brain, and the influence of common genetic polymorphisms on brain function
- Determining why some patients respond to treatments and others don’t
- Using novel approaches to diagnosing mental illnesses
- Developing models for future drug development
Publications
Journals
Casetta C, Santosh P, Bayley R, et al. , 2024, CLEAR – clozapine in early psychosis: study protocol for a multi-centre, randomised controlled trial of clozapine vs other antipsychotics for young people with treatment resistant schizophrenia in real world settings, Bmc Psychiatry, Vol:24
Onwordi EC, Whitehurst T, Shatalina E, et al. , 2024, Synaptic terminal density early in the course of schizophrenia: an in vivo UCB-J positron emission tomographic imaging study of SV2A, Biological Psychiatry, Vol:95, ISSN:0006-3223, Pages:639-646
Khodosevich K, Dragicevic K, Howes O, 2024, Drug targeting in psychiatric disorders - how to overcome the loss in translation?, Nat Rev Drug Discov, Vol:23, Pages:218-231
Salazar de Pablo G, Aymerich C, Guinart D, et al. , 2024, What is the duration of untreated psychosis worldwide? - A meta-analysis of pooled mean and median time and regional trends and other correlates across 369 studies., Psychol Med, Vol:54, Pages:652-662
O'Brien O, Arumuham A, Mizuno Y, et al. , 2024, Immune response to vaccination in people with psychotic disorders relative to healthy controls: prospective study of SARS-CoV-2 vaccination., Bjpsych Open, Vol:10, ISSN:2056-4724