MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Thomas Wolfers PhD Donders Center for Cognitive Neuroimaging Kapittelweg 29 6525EN Nijmegen The Netherlands MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are severe and complex mental disorders. Currently, the most common approach in characterizing disorders biologically is by comparing patient groups with groups of healthy individuals. We employed a fundamentally different approach and investigated how much the brains of individual patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder differ from one another. For this purpose, we selected brain scans from healthy individuals to model a norm reflecting the healthy range, subsequently we compared the brain scans of patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder to this norm on the level of the individual. The main outcome was that individuals with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder differ substantially from one another, thus, considering only the ‘average patient’ has little to say about what might be occurring in the brain of an individual patient. (more…)