Mapping brain changes in nearly 1,300 people with different types of mental illness reveals diversity across conditions.
A breakthrough project mapping brain changes in nearly 1,300 people diagnosed 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.
The study, published in Nature Neuroscience and led by researchers at Monash University’s Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health and School of Psychological Sciences, used brain imaging to measure the size, or volume, of over 1000 different brain regions.
Innovative Statistical Methods Reveal Individual Differences
“Over the past few decades, researchers have mapped brain areas showing reduced volume in people diagnosed with a wide variety of mental illness, but this work has largely focused on group averages, which makes it difficult to understand what is happening in the brains of individual people,” said PhD student Ms. Ashlea Segal, who led the research. “For example, knowing that the average height of the Australian population is about 1.7 m tells me very little about the height of my next-door neighbor,” she added.
The team used new statistical techniques developed by Prof Andre Marquand at the Donders Institute, Netherlands, who co-led the project, to map regions in the brain showing unusually small or large volumes in people diagnosed with either schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or DOI: 10.1038/s41593-023-01404-6