A breakthrough project mapping brain changes in patients with six different types of mental illness has revealed the extraordinary diversity of brain changes found in people with conditions like major depression and schizophrenia. Professor Alex Fornito from Monash University says unlike other studies, the work focuses on individual people.
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00:00 We looked at scans acquired in over 2,500 people from, and the data was acquired at
00:10 25 different locations around the world, so it was a really collaborative effort.
00:14 And having this large data set allowed us to use some new statistical techniques where
00:18 we can train a model to learn expectations for what the general population should look
00:24 like in terms of brain size.
00:26 So much like a growth chart that's used in paediatric medicine, many parents might be
00:31 familiar with taking their newborn to get things like height, weight and head circumference
00:36 measured and the doctor will compare those values with what they see in the general population
00:41 to see if the baby is growing in the right way.
00:43 We can now do a similar thing with the brain and we did this looking at the size of over
00:48 a thousand different brain regions.
00:50 And the six conditions we looked at were schizophrenia, attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder,
00:55 major depression, bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder and autism spectrum disorder.
01:01 We found that people with any one of those conditions were generally more likely to show
01:05 a deviation from population expectations, so areas where we see unusually large or small
01:10 volume estimates relative to the population.
01:14 But the specific areas in which these deviations occurred were highly variable.
01:18 So for any group of people with the same diagnosis, we didn't find an overlap in, so not more
01:24 than 7% of people showed a deviation in the same brain region.
01:28 So this tells us that any attempts to try to identify a single underlying cause of these
01:32 conditions or a one size fits all approach to treatments is only likely to be effective
01:39 for a small fraction of people.
01:42 But we did find that these deviations aggregated within common brain circuits and networks.
01:46 So this tells us that by trying to target brain networks or circuits rather than individual
01:51 areas, this might be a more fruitful way of trying to develop better treatments.
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