London (Reuters) – A scientific team discovered how electroconvulsive therapy or by electric shock, a controversial but effective, treatment acts in the brain of people with severe depression and ensures that the results could help improve the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness.
Therapy electroconvulsive (ECT) is performed under anesthesia and is to induce a seizure with electric current.
Its reputation is controversial, in part for his role in the 1975 movie “one flew over the cuckoo’s nest” with Jack Nicholson, but is a powerful and effective treatment for patients with disorders of the mind, such as severe depression.
But when applied with success in the world for more than 70 years, scientists didn’t know how it worked exactly or why da result.
Now, a team of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, first demonstrated that the TEC affects communication between the different parts of the brain associated with depression.
In a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the team explains the TEC would control overactive connections between brain areas related to the mood and the areas associated with thinking and concentration.
That, for authors, slows down the enormous impact of the depression on the ability of patients to enjoy life and daily activities.
“We resolved a therapeutic conundrum of 70-year-old,” said Ian Reid, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Aberdeen, who directed the study.
“our key finding is that comparing brain connections before and after ECT, can be seen that the therapy reduces the power of connections, said.
For the first time can describe something that ECT does in the brain that makes sense in the context of what we think it is wrong with people with depression, added the author.
. In recent years, the specialists developed a new theory of how depression affects the brain. They suggest that there is a “hiperconexión” between the brain areas involved in the processing of emotions and the change in the mood and areas linked to thinking and concentration.
David Nutt, Professor of neuropsicofarmacologÃa of the Imperial College of London and did not participate in the study, it was of the view that the results “have much sense”.
“connections disabling between the different areas of the brain is what would be anticipated from the literature published on the depression,” commented.
Nutt added that the results match one of his studies published in January and which discovered that psilocybin, the active ingredient of psychedelic drugs known as magic mushrooms, also alters this network of connections and would be effective against severe depression.
. In the new study, the authors used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the brains of nine patients with depression severe before and after treatment with ect. Then, the team carried out a complex mathematical analysis to investigate brain connectivity.
As responsible for neuroimaging of the University of Aberdeen, Christian Schwarzbauer, who developed the new method to analyze the data on connectivity, the analysis allowed the team know how intercomunicaban more than 25,000 different brain areas.
Schwarzbauer believed that the new approach could also be applied to a variety of brain, such as schizophrenia, autism and dementia disorders, and “would better understand the underlying mechanisms of disease and to develop new diagnostic tools”.
The authors would like to continue to monitor patients to determine if depression and the hyper reappear. In addition, plan to compare their results with the effects of other therapies to treat depression, antidepressants and psychotherapy.
/Por Kate Kelland /
