Project Details
Projekt
Epigenetic risk markers as well as predictors and mechanisms of psychotherapy in acrophobia: Spotlighting the BDNF system
Subject Area
Biological Psychiatry
Term
since 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 505275485
There is converging evidence for DNA methylation to confer risk for anxiety and related disorders, to interact with environmental influences and to be malleable by psychotherapeutic interventions.Yet, there is a considerable gap of knowledge concerning the role of epigenetic mechanisms in anxiety disorders, as the function of histone modifications in human anxiety disorders remains completely unstudied. Thus, in order to more comprehensively illuminate the epigenetic machinery underlying clinical fear-/anxiety-related phenotypes and transporting behavioral, i.e. psychotherapeutic effects, the present project will apply a paradigmatic case-control and longitudinal psychotherapy-epigenetic design using a virtual reality (VR) environment in acrophobia as a well-defined and standardized exposure-based, cognitive-behavioral psychotherapeutic treatment (CBT). In this effort, we will for the first time investigate histone modifications, in synopsis with DNA methylation, exemplarily for the brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) gene in an integrative proof-of-concept model. In detail, the present project aims to address I) differences in epigenetic profiles between patients with acrophobia and healthy controls and thus epigenetic risk profiles of specific phobias, II) the potential of epigenetic signatures to predict VR-based CBT response, III) the role of the temporal dynamics of epigenetic patterns as potential mechanistic correlates of clinical changes from pre- to post-VR-based CBT, and IV), the functional impact of differential epigenetic profiles and epigenetic changes on an mRNA/protein expression level.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
