María Belén Aburto Ponce, a young researcher at the Millennium Nucleus Imhay, is currently working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research in New York, where she is studying the altered mechanisms of sensory perception that could explain some symptoms of this mental illness.

Dr. M. Belén Aburto Ponce is working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research in New York.

The challenge for mental health professionals is to understand why some people develop a lifelong illness like schizophrenia and others do not, and what interventions can be made to slow the progression of this mental condition. A young Chilean scientist is part of a team that is making progress in studying this topic.

She is María Belén Aburto Ponce, a biologist, Master of Science in Biological Sciences and Doctor of Biomedical Sciences from the University of Chile, who has dedicated herself to investigating the neuronal processing of these patients.

Specifically, Dr. Aburto studies how people with High-Risk Mental States (HRMS) perceive sounds with emotional content. Her goal is to identify indicators of the severity of the conditions and eventually be able to predict who will develop a disease. Some results of the studies in which she participates show that in fact in people with schizophrenia there is a correlation between their symptoms and the different way in which they process neutral sounds, sad or happy sounds.

Moving Towards Treatment

To delve deeper into this field and move towards identifying symptoms and sensory processing in later stages of the disease, in 2022 the young Imhay researcher arrived at Columbia University in New York to do a postdoctoral fellowship with the renowned scientist Antígona Martínez of the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research (NKI), dependent on the New York State Office of Mental Health, who heads one of the laboratories dedicated to studying the spatio-temporal dynamics of visual processing deficits in schizophrenia.

«One of the hypotheses is that the symptoms of schizophrenia can be explained, in part, by alterations in sensory processing,» says María Belén Aburto. «Basically, these patients have difficulties, for example, in perceiving or recognizing emotions in people’s faces because they are not looking at the part of the face that they should see in order to define the emotion on that face,» adds the researcher.

Through magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalograms, they have been able to measure the neuronal activity of patients when they are presented with certain stimuli, and verify that there are indeed alterations compared to the maps of neurotypical people (people who do not have neurodevelopmental alterations).

In the NKI laboratory, researchers have also taken steps towards possible forms of treatment or remediation of symptoms. Through transcranial stimulation, they have managed to improve the ability of patients to recognize emotions on moving faces, that is, while facial expressions change.

«For example, when a person starts to laugh in a video, that activates a part of the brain that is different from when we see a picture of someone laughing. So, we have seen that this stimulation makes people increase the efficiency of emotion recognition,» explains Dr. Aburto.

As the project is still in the experimental phase, the positive effects have only been seen during the half hour that transcranial stimulation lasts. It remains to be seen whether performing more frequent or longer sessions achieves more persistent effects.