Welcome to the 21st WCP Virtual Congress Program Scheduling

Schizophrenia has long been known as a brain disease, but the question of whether it involved deterioration in the Kraeplinian sense has always been controversial and difficult to study. MRI has enabled many longitudinal studies to be performed that have shown how the brain seems to change over time significantly more in patients with schizophrenia than in controls. The debate still continues about whether these findings are partially related to the medications used to treat the illness, or the poor life's circumstances of patients, or whether it is a form of accelerated aging that is central to the disease process. The impact of potential moderators of brain morphology in schizophrenia will be reviewed with the aim to disentangle their potential specific contribution to brain dismorphology at different stages of illness starting from the onset of schizophrenia and over the entire course of the illness. As for functional neuroimaging, a special focus will be given to novel and heuristic studies on neurofeedback which allows a measure of control over one's cognitive processes. Evidence will be presented that neurofeedback relying on information from a brain region involved in processes targeted for clinical intervention, and based on the fMRI signal presented in real time to individuals helps them alter brain function in the targeted brain region: the brain changes are also associated with improvement in clinical symptoms. This Symposium is presented by the WPA Section of Neuroimaging