Neuropsychopharmacology: Recent MEG investigations

Abstract

Neuroimaging methods can play an increasingly important role in a highly complex drug development process by providing sensitive biomarkers of disease state and the effects of therapeutic intervention. Based on the functional mapping of the anatomical specificity of drug effects, neuroimaging methods can illuminate the basic mechanisms of a disease and can assist in guiding the development of drugs with high specificity and sensitivity in the context of clinical applications and the increased reliance on personalized medicine. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) reflects synaptic currents directly, it is free of vascular confounds, and its sources can be modeled with increasingly sophisticated algorithms that often incorporate complementary imaging modalities, making it highly applicable to neuropsychopharmacological investigations. Indeed, numerous MEG studies have examined spontaneous or task-related brain activity in response to neuromodulators and drugs of abuse. With emphasis on the spectral analysis models, this chapter briefly reviews the MEG studies manipulating GABA, acetylcholine, dopamine, glutamate, and alcohol in healthy cohorts, as well as the research on Parkinson's disease, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and anesthesia in epilepsy. These studies provide unique insight into the spatiotemporal characteristics of the effects of pharmacological agents on different neurofunctional systems in health and disease and can reveal their effects on the oscillatory synchrony in real time and at the level of an interactive multifocal system. The MEG is increasingly relevant for understanding the neuropharmacology of psychoactive substances and for developing realistic neural models of the neuropsychiatric disorders and their sensitivity to pharmacological intervention.