We're preparing to conduct a study of the effect of a drug on memory
function and hippocampal activity, using O-15 PET. PET was originally
chosen partly because we wanted to hook up a lot of equipment that would
not be feasible in an fMRI environment. Now, however, I'm considering a
streamlined version that could work nicely in the magnet. My question is,
I have so far seen very few drug studies with fMRI(as compared to PET). Is
there any intrinsic reason why fMRI is less suited to drug effects
studies? I haven't been able to find any references to this topic and
would very much appreciate some pointers. I realize that for fMRI one
would need to treat the drug effect as an interaction effect (i.e., how
does the drug treatment affect the difference between the activation
memory task and a reference control task?), but are there any
considerations beyond that?
Stephan Hamann
Dept. of Psychology
Emory University
Atlanta, GA 30322
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