Alumna Megan Beauchemin presents poster on Acute treatment with the antipsychotic drug, risperidone, alters brain activity and circadian rhythms in the heart.
Karen Houseknecht’s lab (UNECOM) participated in the annual Costas T. Lambrew Maine Medical Center Research Retreat on May 2, 2017 held at Maine Medical Center in Portland. Work from Karen’s lab which focuses on the regulation of mood and metabolism and specifically the role of psychiatric medications in modulating metabolic status, was highlighted in 2 poster presentations.
Megan Beauchemin, PhD, Post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory, presented a poster entitled: “Acute treatment with the antipsychotic drug, risperidone, alters brain activity and circadian rhythms in the heart”. This poster was awarded the 2nd place award in the Basic Science category for scientific presentations. This work shows for the first time that antipsychotic medications activate areas in the brain associated with regulation of circadian function and also alter the expression of circadian genes in the heart. Houseknecht, senior author on the work, proposes that these data suggest that antipsychotic medications, which are widely prescribed off-label to vulnerable populations including children, may cause early effects on cardiac function that have been previously undetected.
Collaborators on this work include Dr. Katie Motyl and Dr. Anyonya Guntar, Department of Molecular Medicine, Maine Medical Center Research Institute; Deborah Barlow (technician, Houseknecht lab); Celeste Bouchard (UNECOM class of 2020) and Peter Cardonna, UNE Imaging Core.