Funding Opportunity Number: PAR-25-282
Deadline: February 16, 2025, March 16, 2025
Purpose
This Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) encourages mechanistic and translational research on the onset and worsening of mood and psychosis during the menopausal transition. For the purpose of this NOFO, the menopausal transition (or perimenopause) is defined as the time of onset of menstrual cycle changes and menopause-related symptoms to early post-menopause. Because mood disruption (including but not limited to depressed mood, mood lability, emotion dysregulation, and mania) as well as psychosis occur along a continuum of severity, this NOFO encourages projects that take a dimensional approach to studying this continuum. However, this does not preclude projects that characterize participants using existing diagnostic criteria (e.g., including but not limited to diagnoses of depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, bipolar and related disorders, or schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders).
Research Objectives
This NOFO is intended to support research designed to identify the neurobiological, behavioral, and social mechanisms underlying the onset and exacerbation of mood and psychotic disorders during the menopausal transition, with consideration for identification of novel targets for future development of prevention and intervention efforts. Studies that leverage concepts, methods, and findings emerging from research on normative aging, as well as those that extend research on mood disruption and psychosis in mid-to-late life to focus specifically on the menopausal transition, are encouraged. Research must target populations transitioning through menopause. If scientifically justified, relevant comparison populations may be used. Research is encouraged that assesses symptoms relevant to mood and psychotic disorders dimensionally, integrates across multiple levels of analysis (including but not limited to brain-level measurements), and employs cutting-edge methodology from fields such as cognitive and affective neuroscience, neuroimaging, neurophysiology, neuroendocrinology, lifespan psychology, and geroscience. Research is also encouraged that adopts an intersectionality framework (i.e., a framework that addresses the multiple dimensions of individuals’ identity and social systems as they intersect with one another).
A Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) approach encourages taking a dimensional perspective with respect to assessing psychopathology, and concentrating on aspects of behavior and brain function that span a range from intact to gradations of impairment, independent of diagnosis. Thus, in such an approach, recruitment and eligibility of study participants need not be determined on the basis of traditional diagnostic categories, but should instead be based on criteria that result in a sample that is optimized to study the clinical phenomena of interest over their full range of variability. Such an emphasis on understanding the full dimensionality of neurobehavioral functioning generally precludes simple, dichotomous designs comparing patients versus controls. However, it is not inconsistent with the RDoC approach to additionally characterize transdiagnostic samples of participants, recruited to represent the clinical phenomena of interest across the full range of variability, into existing diagnostic criteria – this allows investigators to draw links from novel approaches of characterization and classification to existing diagnostic categories and extant research. Under this NOFO, if study hypotheses and/or enrollment criteria are not based on existing diagnostic criteria (i.e., an RDoC or other dimensional construct is proposed to serve as the primary variable representing psychopathology), the study design and sampling plan must include an adequate number of individuals assessed as falling within the more severely impaired ranges of that dimension. If taking an RDoC approach, projects must employ assessment methods that converge on the construct from at least two levels of analysis. RDoC units of analysis (potential levels of measurement) include genes, molecules, cells, circuits, physiology, behavior, and self-report.
If the proposed research involves magnetic resonance (MR) neuroimaging, applicants are encouraged, but not limited, to use very high field (>7 Tesla) multimodal MR applications to study dynamic brain processes in precise regions and circuits that could identify subtle pathophysiological mechanisms driving the emergence and worsening of mood disruption, emotion dysregulation, and psychosis symptoms during the menopause transition that are unlikely identifiable in vivo at lower MR field strengths. A dynamic component is one that samples brain changes over time either in conjunction with a challenge (e.g., task-based, inducing or during different physiological/psychological states) or over multiple periods of time, such as with a longitudinal design and is encouraged.
For more information, please see the opportunity webpage.