Dr. Rudolf Uher, Brain Repair Centre Researchers

Dr. Rudolf Uher

http://www.iop.kcl.ac.uk/staff/profile/default.aspx?go=11795

Rudolf Uher is a psychiatrist with interest in personalized prevention and treatment for severe mental illness, including depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Severe forms of these disabling conditions affect approximately 1 in 20 individuals and are responsible for a large proportion of suffering and economic burden of disease world-wide. Severe mental illness most often starts in late adolescence or early adulthood and affects the individual for the rest of their life. There are effective treatments but no definite cure. To date, Dr. Uher has been exploring the genetic and environmental causes of mental illness to find out if they can help to predict which treatment will work for whom. He has published reports on how genetic dispositions and adverse experiences work together in the development of mental health and illness and how genetic variation can determine that one drug can be more helpful for an individual than another drug - without trying. In collaboration with researchers at the Dalhousie University and the Brain Repair Centre, Dr. Uher is planning a research project to find out if mental illness can be nipped in the bud through a targeted intervention in adolescence or early adulthood.