William Mellick
Medical University of South Carolina, SC·Neuroscience·Early-career
Nearly 40% of people with bipolar disorder also develop alcohol use disorder (AUD). This combination, called AUD+BD, brings a worse course of illness, poorer response to treatment and higher suicide risk than either condition alone.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
alcohol use disorder
bipolar disorder
co-occurring disorders
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Test whether parents with alcohol use disorder plus bipolar disorder and their unaffected teens show stronger brain responses to reward than AUD-only families, using fMRI during social reward and decision-making tasks.
- Compare functional connectivity, how strongly reward regions coordinate their activity, between AUD+BD and AUD-only parent–teen pairs, using fMRI data.
- Test whether white-matter integrity in reward pathways is reduced in AUD+BD families compared with AUD-only families, using diffusion kurtosis imaging (an MRI method).
More about the research
Problems in the brain's reward circuitry, the network that processes pleasure, motivation and decisions, are central to both disorders. Yet this circuitry has barely been studied in people with both conditions.
Why it matters
People with both alcohol use disorder and bipolar disorder are poorly served by current treatments and face high suicide risk. Identifying reward-circuit differences in affected parents and their unaffected teens could point to brain targets for more precise treatment. It could also guide prevention for at-risk youth.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Cecilia Hinojosa
University of New Mexico, NM·Neuroscience·Early-career
Define sex differences in reward-related brain circuitry, including the striatum, that relate to alcohol craving and drinking in trauma-exposed women and men, using functional neuroimaging.
Jens H Jensen
Medical University of South Carolina, SC·Neuroscience
Determine whether diffusional kurtosis imaging (DKI), an MRI method that measures water movement in tissue, can track brain microstructure changes in 3xTg-AD mice treated with the drug P021 from 2 to 18 months of age.
Mary Baugh
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA·Neuroscience·Early-career
Test whether excess adiposity and reduced insulin sensitivity weaken post-ingestive reward learning, using a flavor-nutrient learning paradigm in which a flavor is conditioned to the nutrients absorbed after swallowing.
The school
Medical University of South Carolina: 19 labs on PI Pages, $321M a year on research, 271 research doctorates a year.
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