Studying Anxiety and Depression with Diffusion MRI Anxiety disorders and depression are widespread among adolescents in the US, affecting as many as one in four 13- to 18-year-olds. Determining the best course of treatment can be difficult, though, as we still don’t fully understand the biology underlying them. Now, using cutting-edge brain imaging technology, a study under way at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging could offer new insights into this biology, and in doing so help improve the ways we approach anxiety and depression. Ultimately, the work could also yield a quantitative means of diagnosing the disorders.
Examining Mental Disorders as Part of the Human Connectome The study, the Boston Adolescent Neuroimaging of Depression and Anxiety (BANDA) study, emerged from the Human Connectome Project (HCP), a large-scale, multi-institutional collaboration including the Martinos Center. The HCP has demonstrated since its launch in 2010 an extraordinary ability to map the neural pathways in the healthy human brain. Using a range of MRI-based technologies, many of them developed in the Martinos Center, it has already helped answer a range of seemingly intractable basic science questions. Begun in late 2015, the BANDA study is now also applying these technologies to a population of adolescents with anxiety disorders and depression. In fact, it is among the first projects funded by the National Institutes of Health to look at a disease population using data collection protocols developed by the HCP. The study is thus an important step forward, says Anastasia Yendiki, principal investigator of the Martinos Center site of the study. It opens up new areas of inquiry for the HCP while also aiding a population very much in need of the insights it can provide. “Our understanding of the biological mechanisms of mental illness is still limited,” she says. “This makes it very challenging to predict which treatment will work for which patient. We hope that, by mapping the brain signatures of depression and anxiety disorders at an age that is critical for brain development, we can discover reliable biomarkers that will allow doctors to perform accurate diagnoses and prescribe appropriate treatments for patients.” The study has been recruiting patients from three different sites across Boston, including the Child Cognitive Behavioral Therapy program at MGH as well as sites at Boston University and McLean Hospital. It has also been recruiting patients from among those presenting to the general child outpatient psychiatry
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