The Research of Dr. Tyrone Cannon

Music Festival sponsored scientist Ty Cannon, Ph.D. at UCLA: Developing psychosis prevention now

Dr. Ty Cannon

The Staglin Music Festival Center for the Assessment and Prevention of Prodromal States (CAPPS) and the North American Prodromal Longitudinal Study (NAPLS)

If teens who are at risk for developing psychosis can be identified and treated before the onset of a full-blown illness, they have a chance to avoid ever getting sick. At the Staglin Music Festival Center for the Assessment and Prevention of Prodromal States (“CAPPS”) at UCLA, Dr. Ty Cannon is heading a team of scientists and clinicians to develop the means to head off psychosis as a regular clinical intervention. Treating someone properly before they have a full-blown psychotic episode can be far better for them than treating them afterward, because an episode produces long-term changes in the brain that are far harder to treat. In the last year, the center has discovered an MRI scan technique that, when fully developed, can give "nearly perfect prediction of psychosis outcome" for at-risk patients—and enable confidence in preventive treatment for them.

Dr. Cannon has also been a leader in the formation of two other Music Festival-funded research organizations of which CAPPS is a part: the North American Prodromal Longitudinal Study (NAPLS) a consortium of eight North American prodromal research centers, and the International Prodromal Research Network (IPRN), comprising 18 similar programs from around the country and the world.

This year, the NAPLS has been seeking $25 million from a combination of public and private sources to strengthen their psychosis prediction and treatment ability. Currently, their testing has registered a sensitivity of about 40%. This means that 40% of test subjects who would develop psychosis can be identified before they actually do. This is good, but not good enough. The NAPLS will use this additional funding to further assess a group of 720 prodromal patients and 240 healthy control subjects using genomic, neuroimaging, electrophysiological and hormonal analyses, with a (very achievable) goal of raising the tests' predictive sensitivity to 80%. This would mean that a full 80% of people who would develop psychosis could be treated early, and, hopefully, saved from it. This would dramatically improve the course of thousands, and soon potentially millions of lives.

Here's more good news: Now that the NAPLS has just received a roughly $20 million grant from the NIMH to fund most of this study, it only needs $5.5 million over 5 years from the private sector to complete these steps:

1. perform the study group's whole-genome DNA and RNA expression analyses
2. track participants' brain changes over time with functional neuroimaging, and
3. evaluate cognitive-behavioral and family therapies for the patients involved, to preserve their health and prevent psychosis conversion.

$5.5 million is clearly within our capacity to generate over 5 years, if you and enough others contribute.

Read Dr. Cannon's proposal for this project

For more information on Dr. Cannon and the NAPLS' research proposal, please call us at (707) 944-0477 or email Cindy Dyar.

The UCLA Center for Cognitive Neuroscience

Another new UCLA facility receiving substantial support from the Music Festival is the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. Since it received its initial grant from the Music Festival in 2005 to support its state-of-the-art brain imaging and genetic research technologies, coupled with additional grants from the Betty O'Shaughnessy Foundation and the NIMH, it has demonstrated a substantial overlap in the genetic bases for schizophrenia and mood disorders such as bipolar disorder. Also, this year, it has validated the dysbindin gene, whose mechanisms were previously under investigation by Festival-sponsored scientist Dr. Susan Voglmaier as a susceptibility gene for schizophrenia.

Read more about current research at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience

How you can support this research

Many festival-sponsored scientists will be present at next year's Music Festival for Mental Health on September 12, 2009. For a chance to meet them in person, please buy tickets to attend. Or, you can make a tax-deductible donation to the cause. To learn more, please see the page on our mission, or email or call us at (707) 944-0477 if you have any questions. Thank you!

Shari, Garen, Brandon and Shannon Staglin

About next year's event