Alyssa Nielson
Biology 1610-008
Dr. Michaela Gazdik Stofer
February 22, 2017
I, like many
others, have family and friends that have been diagnosed with depression. Most of them are on or have tried
antidepressants. In the past I have
worked as a medical assistant for a family doctor and it was not uncommon to have
multiple patients a day come in for depression.
From first-hand experience I have seen how prevalent and severe
depression can be; which drew me to this article. At the beginning of the post it discusses how
with other diseases there are lab tests that aid in diagnosing. However, depression is diagnosed simply by
reporting certain symptoms. The symptoms
are very far ranged and vary from person to person.
From
previous research, it has been shown that people with depression have different
brain activity than a healthy person. Conor
Liston, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at Weill Cornell Medicine, made an
observation that lead to this experiment.
He noticed when under stress one’s mental flexibility and ability to adapt
to new situations is inhibited. Liston wanted
to know the exact spot in the brain that is affected by depression. By using a resting-state functional MRI
(fMRI) they looked for differences in brain connectivity between depressed and
healthy people. Liston was able to get
1,188 individuals scans by reaching out to 17 other research sites worldwide
that had collected fMRI scans. Some of
the scans were of healthy individuals and some were of depressed patients. With this amount of data they were able to
examine 258 areas of the brain. A
computer system was then used to find patterns in the data. Depressed people could be separated from
healthy people by differences in the fMRI in the limbic and frontostriatal
areas. The limbic system controls emotions and frontostriatal helps coordinate motor
and cognitive functions. Within those
areas Liston was able to further divide depressed patient into four
clusters/groups.
The results have
two important meanings. One, it will
help to diagnose patients more clearly with depression because each subgroup
had more defined symptoms. Second, it
will help with treatment. Patients in
certain subgroups responded better to specific medications or nonpharmaceutical
treatment. I enjoyed this article
because they were able to find something new that can help depression patients
and at the same time it opened a lot of doors for further research
opportunities.
Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-imaging-identifies-different-types-of-depression/
What were the 4 different ways that they could separate those that had depression (their symptoms, what part of the brain is affected.. etc)?
ReplyDeleteHE
To answer your question HE, I looked into the article that Alyssa Nielson referred to. In the article, it simply states that four subgroups were discovered and defined based on how the patient reacted to the treatment. Curious to find the answer, I found another article on this study. Connor Liston states “We can now predict with high accuracy whether or not a patient will respond to transcranial magnetic stimulation therapy, which is significant because it takes five weeks to know if this type of treatment works.” This article, much like the one that Alyssa used, emphasizes that the four groups are based on the treatment. In short, the four different ways they separate the patients into the smaller groups are based upon how they react to treatment.
ReplyDelete(GG)
Cornell University “Neuroimaging Categorizes Four Depression Subtypes.” NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 6 December 2016.
Delete.
I am going into the medical field and found this article to be fascinating.
ReplyDeleteIt appears in today's society everyone seems to be either on or knows someone who is on a medication for depression.
My question is: When will this research related to MRI scans that can help detect depression be available to the medical community?
I think that since depression is now diagnosed with the person reporting their symptoms it would be so much better to have a "second opinion" of an actual MRI scan that would show the physiological signs of depression.
JH