Although often maligned, is the so-called electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) for more than 70 years of the most successful methods in psychiatry. Especially with the not so rare drug-resistant depression in psychiatric hospitals it is a reasonable option, especially since doctors classify unanimously considered safe, side effects and pain free.
Today it is carried out under a short general anesthetic breathing oxygen. With just a few-second current pulses while a seizure is triggered, usually six to twelve treatments. As a major side effect is usually only arise - usually reversible - Disturbances of the short-term memory, but no brain damage. It was not clear yet, however, why ECT works at all.
A team led by Jennifer Perrin and Chris Bauer of the University of Aberdeen, is now offering an explanation for the mechanism of healing surges or short of it caused by seizures. The researchers were using an imaging technique to show how changes in the brain of patients with ECT. Accordingly, the nerve cells of a severely depressed people are "hyper-linked functional", and it is this hyper-linking disappears by the treatment (PNAS Online).
Perrin and Schwarzbauer could thus experimentally confirm an assumption that is made more recently in psychiatry - and actually is counterintuitive. "Intuitively, one would expect so, that the depressed brain, is much less connected," says Schwarzenbauer, including mental patients were more inclined to social withdrawal and reduced communication. But perhaps just had this strong internal linking the reason that people with depression are not so much concerned with the outside world. In any event, the new findings "very robust statistically," says Black farmers, even when examined in the study, only nine patients.
The proof of the researchers, by using a new mathematical method in conjunction with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while the communication between 25,000 sites in the brain observed and analyzed.
Unlike the classical functional imaging while no external stimulation such as by voice or images is required, each of which activates only the corresponding brain centers. The patients had to be only 20 minutes into your brain scanner. Thus a better overall picture of the brain condition. In the analysis it could be seen that in depressed patients a region in the frontal lobes of the brain particularly strongly communicated to the rest of the brain. And with that recovery of this communication to weaken.
This result is not only important for the understanding of ECT, but could also help in developing new approaches for depression, hopes Schwarzbauer. The now measurable degree of internal brain communication could serve as an indicator, the estimated efficacy of new medications and psychotherapies could. "An interesting theory," the expert ECT Here Folkerts by Reinhard riveter Hospital commented in Wilhelmshaven, which would still be confirmed by further studies.
Today it is carried out under a short general anesthetic breathing oxygen. With just a few-second current pulses while a seizure is triggered, usually six to twelve treatments. As a major side effect is usually only arise - usually reversible - Disturbances of the short-term memory, but no brain damage. It was not clear yet, however, why ECT works at all.
A team led by Jennifer Perrin and Chris Bauer of the University of Aberdeen, is now offering an explanation for the mechanism of healing surges or short of it caused by seizures. The researchers were using an imaging technique to show how changes in the brain of patients with ECT. Accordingly, the nerve cells of a severely depressed people are "hyper-linked functional", and it is this hyper-linking disappears by the treatment (PNAS Online).
Perrin and Schwarzbauer could thus experimentally confirm an assumption that is made more recently in psychiatry - and actually is counterintuitive. "Intuitively, one would expect so, that the depressed brain, is much less connected," says Schwarzenbauer, including mental patients were more inclined to social withdrawal and reduced communication. But perhaps just had this strong internal linking the reason that people with depression are not so much concerned with the outside world. In any event, the new findings "very robust statistically," says Black farmers, even when examined in the study, only nine patients.
The proof of the researchers, by using a new mathematical method in conjunction with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while the communication between 25,000 sites in the brain observed and analyzed.
Unlike the classical functional imaging while no external stimulation such as by voice or images is required, each of which activates only the corresponding brain centers. The patients had to be only 20 minutes into your brain scanner. Thus a better overall picture of the brain condition. In the analysis it could be seen that in depressed patients a region in the frontal lobes of the brain particularly strongly communicated to the rest of the brain. And with that recovery of this communication to weaken.
This result is not only important for the understanding of ECT, but could also help in developing new approaches for depression, hopes Schwarzbauer. The now measurable degree of internal brain communication could serve as an indicator, the estimated efficacy of new medications and psychotherapies could. "An interesting theory," the expert ECT Here Folkerts by Reinhard riveter Hospital commented in Wilhelmshaven, which would still be confirmed by further studies.
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