14 DAY TRIAL // A team of investigators from the Wayne State University announces the development of a new diagnostics tool aimed at uncovering children who suffer from mental health issues such as depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
At this point, the method is especially designed for the young ones, but subsequent advancements could see it used on adults as well. Experts at the university say that their new approach relies on using the thickness of the brain for teasing out which of the kids are at increased risks.
This approach is surprisingly effective, scientists say, as it can even tell children who suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) apart from those with major depressive disorder (MDD).
The technique can also tell those who have a mental issue apart from those who are healthy. Cortical thickness was never used as an indicator for such conditions before, the team adds.
In the new experiments, conducted on 24 MDD patients, 24 OCD patients and 30 healthy controls, the investigators determined that those who were sick tended to exhibit cortical thinning in five regions acrorss the brain.
Of this group, those who were suffering from depression tended to exhibit thickened cortical tissue in the bilateral temporal pole, a region of the brain that past studies demonstrated is involved in underlying depression, PsychCentral reports.
As far as OCD patients went, the only thing that separated their brains from those of healthy controls was a slight thinning of the left supramarginal gyrus, says study author Dr. David Rosenberg.
“By measuring cortical thickness, we were able to distinguish depressed children not only from healthy children without depression, but also from those with another psychiatric disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder,” he goes on to say.
“Depressed children with and without a family history of depression who met the same clinical criteria of depression and who appeared the same clinically, had completely different cortical thickness based on their family history of depression,” Rosenberg explains further.
The new discovery “may have potential treatment significance for one-third of depressed children who do not respond to any treatment, and also for many who only partially respond with continued functional impairment,” the team leader comments.
“We have found a clue to guide us to look at subtypes of depression just as we would in other chronic medical illnesses like diabetes, such as insulin dependent and non-insulin dependent diabetes,” he concludes.
More details of the study and its conclusions were published in the latest issue of the esteemed journal Archives of General Psychiatry.