I am working on psychosis in Prader Willi syndrome. PWS is a rare genetic disease characterised by hyperphagia, poor muscle tone, intellectual disability, and mental health problems such as depression anxiety and psychosis. PWS is caused by the lack of paternal expression on chromosome 15. This can be due to a deletion or a maternal uniparental disomy (mUPD, = having twice the maternal chromosome instead of one from each parent). People with PWS due to mUPD have a 60 to 90% risk of developing psychosis. In my PhD, I will use EEG to find markers of risk of psychosis in PWS, and try to understand the mechanisms of psychosis in PWS.
