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School of Medicine

Professor Bill Deakin PhD, FRCPsych, FmedSci

Photograph of Bill Deakin

Professor of Psychiatry and Director NPU

Academic base at Neuroscience and Psychiatry Unit, G.907 Stopford Building

Clinic base at Department of Psychiatry, Rawnsley Building, Manchester Royal Infirmary

 

Research

Bill Deakin heads Neuroscience Research in the Division of Psychiatry. An important focus of his group is to use modern imaging techniques to directly visualise 5HT and glutamate working in the brain. Patients and volunteers lie in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner and the images show which parts of the brain respond to drugs chosen to probe 5HT or glutamate functioning and how it performs mental tasks. The group can show, for example, that a single dose of an antidepressant drug lights up areas of the brain concerned with anxiety responses and turns off other areas concerned with memory in healthy volunteers.

The group can also visualise how these neurotransmitters modify how the brain processes information. For example, viewing the image of a fearful face engaged regions of the brain concerned with emotion; a pre-dose of an antidepressant specifically affects this part of the response while not affecting fear responses in other brain regions. They are now investigating these effects in patients with anxiety, depression and antisocial behaviour.

Humans share the same set of about 30,000 genes including those concerned with 5HT and glutamate, but the particular copies we each carry from our mother and father are often slightly different and vary in their activity. Comparing brain responses in individuals with different variants is a new focus of the group’s work. For example, they used the internet to recruit more than 1000 individuals who completed a questionnaire about schizophrenia-like experiences. Those prone to such experiences were more likely to have an inactive variant of a neurotransmitter gene. This is a new approach to unravelling the role of genes in mental illness.

 

Biography

Bill graduated in Medicine at Leeds University in 1973. He took an extra year in his training to obtain a 1st in Physiology and this focussed his interest in biology on the brain and the organisation of behaviour. From there, he specialised in Psychiatry and joined the Clinical Research Centre at Northwick Park, London to further his training and enter the field of brain research. Bill has been Professor of Psychiatry for 10 years.

His PhD research at the National Institute for Medical Research, London investigated how distinct 5HT (serotonin) neurone pathways in the rat brain have different functions in regulating adaptive, coping responses to stress.

Bill moved to the University of Manchester as Senior Lecturer in the early 1980s to continue 5HT research but in clinical studies of volunteers and patients with depression, anxiety and antisocial behaviour. One study funded by the Wellcome Trust involved measuring stress hormones in saliva from 500 mothers in the Wythenshawe estate and relating hormone levels to psycho-social adversity and brain 5HT functioning. Some 5HT pathways appear to be involved in anxiety and work to keep us out of risky or stressful situations while others are concerned with resilience in the face of long-term difficulties. 5HT also has important roles in addiction and social behaviour.

Bill developed an interest in the neurobiology of schizophrenia and how the neurotransmitter of the grey matter, glutamate, might be involved in generating the bizarre symptoms such as hearing voices and being deluded.

 

Selected publications

2006

2005

  • Deakin JFW, Elliott R. (2005). Role of the Orbitofrontal Cortex in Reinforcement Processing and Inhibitory Control: Evidence from FMRI Studies in Healthy Human Subjects. International Review of Neurobiology, further details
  • Del-Ben C, Deakin JFW, McKie S, Delvai N, Williams SR, Elliott R, Dolan M, Anderson I. (2005). The effect of Citalopram pretreatment on neuronal responses to neuropsychological tasks in normal volunteers: an FMRI study. Neuropsychopharmacology, 30( 9), 1724-34. Full text doi:10.1038/sj.npp.1300728 further details
  • Kheramin S, Body S, Herrera F, Bradshaw C, Szabadi E, Deakin JFW, Anderson I. (2005). The effect of orbital prefrontal cortex lesions on performance on a progressive ratio schedule: implications for models of inter-temporal choice. Behav Brain Res, 156( 1), 145-52. further details
  • McKie S, Del-Ben C, Elliott R, Williams SR, Delvai NA, Anderson I, Deakin JFW. (2005). Neuronal effects of acute Citalopram detected by pharmacoMRI (pMRI). Psychopharmacology (Berl), 180 (4), 680-686. Full text doi:10.1007/s00213-005-2270-y further details
  • Toro C, Deakin JFW. (2005). NMDA receptor subunit NRI and postsynaptic protein PSD-95 in hippocampus and orbitofrontal cortex in schizophrenia and mood disorder. Schizophr Res, 80 (2-3), 323-30. Full text doi:10.1016/j.schres.2005.07.003 further details

2004

  • Bantick R, Montgomery A, Bench C, Choudhry T, Malek N, McKenna P, Quested D, Deakin JFW, Grasby P. (2004). A positron emission tomography study of the 5-HT1A receptor in schizophrenia and during clozapine treatment. J Psychopharmacol, 18( 3), 346-54. further details

2003

  • Deakin JFW. (2003). Depression and antisocial personality disorder: two contrasting disorders of 5HT function. Jounal of Neural Transmission, 64, 79-93. further details
  • Elliott R, Newman JL, Longe OA, Deakin JFW. (2003). Differential response patterns in the striatum and orbitofrontal cortex to financial reward in humans: a parametric fMRI study. Journal of Neuroscience, 23 (1), 303-307. further details
  • Gabrobvska-Johnson VS, Scott M, Jeffries S, Thaker N, Baldwin RC, Burns AS, Lewis SW, Deakin JFW. (2003). Right-hemisphere encephalopathy in elderly subjects with schizophrenia evidence from neuropsychological and brain imaging studies. Psychopharmacology (Berl), 169 (3-4), 367-375. Full text doi:10.1007/s00213-003-1524-9 further details
  • Strickland PL, John S, Payton A, Ollier W, Deakin JFW. (2003). Do polymorphic genes influence prolactin responses to dexfenfluramine? American Journal Of Medical Genetics, 120A, 4. further details
  • StricklandP.L, John S, Payton A, Worthington J, Ollier WER, Deakin JFW. (2003). Do genetic polymorphisms of serotonin (5-HT) neurotransmission influence function in humans? American Journal of Medical Genetics, 120A(4), 566-567. further details

2002

  • Strickland PL, Deakin JFW, Percival C, Dixon J, Gater RA, Goldberg DP. (2002). Bio-social origins of depression in the community - Interactions between social adversity, cortisol and serotonin neurotransmission. BRITISH JOURNAL OF PSYCHIATRY, 180, further details
  • Strickland PL, Deakin JFW, Percival C, Dixon J, Gater RR, Goldberg D. (2002). Bio-social origins of depression in the community. Interactions between social adversity, cortisol and serotonin neurotransmission. Br J Psychiatry, 180, 168-173. Full text doi:10.1192/bjp.180.2.168 further details

2001

  • Law AJ, Deakin JFW. (2001). Asymmetrical reductions of hippocampal NMDAR1 glutamate receptor mRNA in the psychoses. NeuroReport, 12(13), 2971-2974. further details

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