Motivational impairments, such as a diminished ability to enjoy pleasurable activities, are a key symptom of many psychiatric disorders. Although it is known that motivational impairments cause suffering for the individual, and that they contribute to much of the disability that affected individuals experience, few successful treatments for such symptoms are currently available. RTOC aims to advance the development of clinical tools to measure impaired motivation in people suffering from mental disorders. From Maastricht University, dr. Dennis Hernaus, prof. Therese van Amelsvoort (both MHeNS) and dr. Anke Sambeth and prof. Wim Riedel (both Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, FPN) will participate in RTOC.

Understanding the symptoms

“There is a clearly visible trend where research groups are increasingly focussing on symptom constructs (e.g. fear, reward processing, attention), rather than diagnostic labels (e.g., anxiety, mood disorders, or ADHD), to better understand and treat mental illness”, says dr. Dennis Hernaus of the School for Mental Health and Neuroscience (MHeNS) at the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences (FHML), Maastricht University. “One potential reason for this trend is that it is becoming increasingly clear that many symptoms are shared among individuals with different diagnostic labels, rather than being unique to a specific diagnosis.”

Rewards and motivation

The researchers from MHeNS are strongly supportive of this transdiagnostic approach: much of their work in the context of motivational impairments is conducted in various clinical, at-risk, and non-clinical populations, and focuses on constructs like reward processing, for example impairments in learning about positive outcomes (reward learning) or deciding if you’re willing to invest time or resources in obtaining a reward (effort-cost computations)

Future treatment

“We were immediately keen to participate when P1vital Products approached us for the RTOC. We felt that participation in this consortium strongly aligned with MHeNS’ mission to conduct translational neuroscience. That is, applying our understanding of basic symptom mechanisms to important clinical conundrums. Via this consortium we hope to contribute to the development of instruments that can reliably measure motivational impairments. Such instruments may be important tools to evaluate future candidate treatments aimed at reducing motivational deficits”, says Hernaus.

For the official RTOC press release, please visit https://www.p1vital.com/research/rtoc/