Dr. med. David Popovic

In 2016, I started my residency at the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University and fellowship from the Else Kröner Fresenius Research College for Translational Psychiatry. As a psychiatrist, my clinical and scientific focus lies in the early diagnosis of and intervention in psychotic disorders, specifically schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is one of the most debilitating diseases in psychiatry that, once fully manifested, is difficult to treat and often follows a chronic progressive course. Schizophrenia shows a distinctive prodromal phase that precedes the onset of the disease by up to 3-4 years but which can even last up to 25 years. In general, it is young adults who start developing these prodromal symptoms, consisting predominantly of cognitive and perceptual dysfunctions that lead to a drop in social functioning. In this stage, psychotic symptoms are rare and mild, so the potential for remission is very high. Clinically, our goal is to identify young adults in prodromal phases of the disease and use multimodal therapies (i.e., psychotherapy, low-dose pharmacotherapy, sociotherapy) to significantly lower their risk of developing schizophrenia or related psychotic disorders. Scientifically, we are using clinical data, structural MRI and machine learning algorithms to develop prediction models to assess a patient’s individual risk of developing a psychotic disorder. Once we can accurately and reliably estimate our patients’ risk and outlook, we will be able to provide a new level of individualized medicine with each patient being treated to the extent that his current state and future risk requires. Within this context, the goal of my work is to better understand and model how environment stress and psychological distress in the at-risk stage impact on brain circuitry and structure as well epigenetic patterns to increase a person’s likelihood for developing this devastating disorder.