Neuroscience & mental health
How do we persuade anorexics to eat healthily? How can we understand the problems inside our heads? How can we prescribe the right treatment for depression?
In order to combat diseases like dementia and Parkinson’s, disorders like depression and addiction, we need to know much more about the mind and how it functions. King’s Health Partners (KHP) brings together leading researchers, clinicians, and academics and gives them the tools they need to understand – as thoroughly as possible – the brain and how it functions.
We are Europe’s leading centre for mental health and neurological research and training; we are comprehensively investigating the causes of and new treatments for mental and neurological conditions which have been globally recognised as being of high priority.
KHP is unique in developing best practices for dealing with the interface between physical and mental health. We are accelerating the pace of translational research through the development of new drugs and treatments, clinical trials and early intervention.
The Biomedical Research Centre for Mental Health encompasses a variety of ways we can gather information including blood samples, brain images, clinician notes and data drawn from patient monitoring, which, when combined with our multidisciplinary team of experts become incredibly powerful tools in the fight against neurological disease.
Research being conducted at the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) is fundamental to our search for a cure for diseases like Alzheimer’s. Researchers found that blood levels of a protein called clusterin could be an early biomarker of Alzheimer’s disease, years before symptoms appear.
We are leading the way in the use of advance imaging technologies such as fMRI and MRI to identify the subtle brain circuit changes that differentiate schizophrenia and depression. These new imaging methods have fantastic potential to impact clinically, to provide quick, accurate diagnosis and enable positive outcomes that embody effective personalised medicine.
The Maurice Wohl Clinical Neuroscience Institute, part of the IoP, is set to be one of Europe’s leading centres for interdisciplinary neuroscience research when it opens in 2013. It will be home to a unique cluster of neuroscience excellence and will assist in fast-tracking new treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and motor neurone disease.
Neurological diseases and mental health disorders are debilitating; with your help we can continue making life-changing breakthroughs.
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King’s Health Partners (KHP) is an Academic Health Sciences Centre comprised of leading NHS Foundation Trusts King’s College Hospital, Guy’s and St Thomas’ and South London and Maudsley along with academic partner King’s College London. It is one of only five such centres in the UK.
King's Institute of Psychiatry
Maurice Wohl Clinical Neuroscience Institute