Originally published January 31 2006
Neuroimaging could one day produce a technique for predicting mental disorders
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Dr. Deborah Yurgelun-Todd, director of cognitive neuroimaging at the Brain Imaging Center at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, talks about the future possibility of predicting mental illness with the aid of new technologies.
The startling changes are partially responsible for teenagers' often erratic and risky behavior and may also harbor the seeds of mental illness.
To date, much of the discussion around teenagers has focused on why so many change from adorable children into sometimes-moody pre-adults.
But the latest research has focused on defining normal and tracking the changes that may trigger mental illnesses or strip the defenses of a mind already vulnerable to psychiatric disease.
Knowing what's "normal" may lead to a tool that can predict which adolescent is likely to fall prey to depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or a variety of other brain disorders.
The key is to figure out who is vulnerable in time to change the course of brain development and head off the disease or reduce the devastation caused by mental illnesses.
The technology to predict who will get a mental illness is still years away, said Dr. Deborah Yurgelun-Todd, director of cognitive neuroimaging at the Brain Imaging Center at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.
For a decade and a half, they have repeatedly scanned the brains of people ranging from toddlers to adults.
The general layout of the brain doesn't change as people mature, Rapoport said.
But the brain grows and shrinks, gets rewired and refined, parts are encased in protective coatings, brain cells die, and sex hormones and neurotransmitters flood in.
Understanding normal brain development is crucial to understanding mental illnesses because some of the areas most changed during adolescence are also implicated in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other psychiatric disorders.
The portrait that is emerging is drawn in gray and white.
Gray matter and white matter, that is.
The layers look as though they are separate entities, like the skin and flesh of fruit.
But gray and white matter are composed of the same stuff - brain cells.
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