Nancy Andreasen: Autobiography And Schizophrenia Research

Dr. Nancy Andreasen is an American psychologist. He is president of the Andrew H. Woods Department of Psychiatry and director of its Brain Imaging Research Center and Mental Health Clinic at Iowa Carver College of Medicine.

While you may have never heard of her, there is Dr. Nancy Andreas, a well-known researcher who has been significantly involved in the study of schizophrenia.  But he hasn’t always been focused on medicine. Dr. Andreasen actually holds a Ph.D. in English Philosophy, Specializing in Renaissance Literature. He worked as a professor in that field until an unexpected turn in his life took place. After the birth of her first daughter, Dr. Nancy Andreasen suffered from serious health problems that inspired her to study medicine.

However, his research is not limited to psychiatry. Andreasen studies creativity, spirituality, brain imaging, genomics, natural history, and the neural mechanisms of schizophrenia. Keep reading and learn more about this woman’s scientific accomplishments.

Nancy Andreasen’s “first”

Nancy Andreasen is a pioneer in many ways. There are several important “firsts” in his career:

• He conducted the first quantitative magnetic resonance imaging study in schizophrenia.
• He developed the first scales for the positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia.
• Dr. Nancy Andreasen conducted the first modern empirical study on creativity that assessed, among other things, family and environmental cognition and their relationship to mental illness.

• He conducted the first study combining genomics and brain imaging methods.

Dr. Andreasen also participated in psychiatric diagnosis in the DSM-III and DSM-IV task groups. In fact, he was responsible for the foundation study of the stress disorder foundation and he defined traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the DSM-III classification system.

Andreasen was also the CEO of the American Psychopathological Association and the Psychiatric Research Society. He is currently a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Schizophrenia research

Dr. Nancy Andreasen is a leading expert in the field of schizophrenia. He has conducted numerous studies and contributed to the understanding of the mechanisms and treatments of this disease.

Schizophrenia is one of the leading general health problems today. It affects 1% of the population. According to the World Health Organization, it ranks ninth in the list of medical diseases in terms of the global burden of the disease. It is listed before cancer, AIDS, heart disease, diabetes and other major diseases.

The symptoms and signs of schizophrenia vary.  These include sensory disturbances (e.g., hallucinations), reasoning thinking (e.g., delusions), disordered thinking, and extreme disordered or unusual motor behavior. However, none of these symptoms and signs are pathognomonic (especially characteristic of that disease).

Thus, none of the patients suffer from all the symptoms. Schizophrenia thus differs from other mental illnesses, which usually affect only one brain system. Some examples are Alzheimer’s disease, which affects memory, and bipolar disorder, which affects the mind.

Re-conceptualizing schizophrenia

Dr. Nancy Andreasen’s modern rethinking of schizophrenia divides symptoms into two categories: positive and negative. He defines positive symptoms as an exaggeration of normal functions (the presence of something that should not be present) and negative symptoms as an absence of normal functions (the absence of something that should be present).

• Positive symptoms include delusions, hallucinations, disordered speech, and disordered behavior.
• Negative symptoms include poor speech and thinking, lack of motivation, anhedonia, apathy, and mental numbness.

In the language of neuroscience, schizophrenia is a disease that affects the distributed nervous system rather than individual cells or individual regions. Most people with schizophrenia have a subjective feeling that their ability to think and feel is in some way disordered or out of touch.

Brain imaging has led scientists to study how the brains of patients with schizophrenia function differently. These studies have shown that subjective “unrelated” or “disorganized” experiences are reflected in the ability of distributed brain regions to send messages back and forth in an efficient and accurate manner.

The origin of the word “schizophrenia” is a complete description of this disease. It literally means “fragmented or unrelated mind”. That is what scientists have noticed through brain imaging.

A life dedicated to research

Dr. Nancy Andreasen is still continuing her research to expand our knowledge of schizophrenia so we can improve the treatment of the disease.  She works on the study of structural and functional brain imaging, the study of longitudinal courses and outcomes, and studies evaluating genetic and genomic factors, then combining them with brain imaging studies.

Dr. Nancy Andreasen is undoubtedly one of the key figures in the field of psychiatry and schizophrenia.