Expertises

Neuropsychopharmacology. Birte Glenthøjs studies focus on patogenetic and pathophysiological mechanisms in psychoses. They comprise a large number of methods. She has extensive international and national collaboration and has, among others, served as president/vice-president for the SCNP and WFSBP and member of several committees for international scientific societies, among others, the ACNP, ECNP and SIRS.

Main research areas

Birte Glethøj has build-up Center for Neuropsychiatric Schizophrenia Research, CNSR, presently comprising 30 researchers. She is also Center Leader of the Lundbeck Foundation Centre of Excellence for Clinical Intervention and Neuropsychiatric Schizophrenia Research (CINS). The overall aim of her research is to provide a scientific basis for an optimise and precise treatment of psychotic patients and prevent progressive brain changes and loss of functions in the patients

Current research

Selected studies:

• Multimodal longitudinal studies on initially antipsychotic-naive psychotic patients. Previous data from the group have supported distinct treatment responses based on dopaminergic and serotonergic brain activity before treatment. In the present cohort there is a specific focus on stratification of patients based changes in the brain glutamatergic, GABAergic and dopaminergic systems and how they relate to disturbances in structural and functional brain networks, reward processing, cognitive functions, psychopathology and treatment and societal outcome.
• Gene-environment interactions and heritability in a large cohort of twins discordant or concordant for psychoses and healthy twin pairs
• Identification of biologically valid subgroups of patients and prediction of treatment outcome and course of illness by the application of unsupervised and supervised machine learning approaches on the multimodal data from the first-episode cohorts.