Stat News: To improve mental health treatments, scientists try to dissect the pieces that make them work

https://www.statnews.com/2019/02/01/back-translation-mental-health-treatments/

 

Oh dear. Maybe the treatments don't actually work.

 

As the reserach is happening at Stanford, maybe OMF or @JaimeS could find out more....

 

Not sure that anything definitive will come of this research, but it's worth a try. How to control variables that aren't in the treatment itself (life events, seasonal changes, etc.). Will they be looking at people who have had every available treatment and for whom nothing has worked?

They are building a huge database for analysis. New trend. Data analysis. Something may be lost in translation. I like individual case histories myself.

I would spend the money on more LSD (and other hallucinogens) research.

 

Oh, you mean re: this study in particular? (Sorry, not sure what you mean.)

 

Hi @JaimeS, my husband doesn't often follow my train of thought either! As referenced in Andy's initial post.
Extract from the article:

"A drug or treatment might be effective because it produces changes in the brain. But it also might work because it drives other types of changes, like at a cognitive or behavioral level. One example: shifting someone’s cognitive bias. Studies show that when people are shown an ambiguous face, some people are prone to interpret it negatively, and others are inclined to interpret it positively. If a psychological treatment bumps a negative bias toward the center, it could produce downstream effects, like improving a person’s mood.

An example of that idea in action: the work of University of California, Los Angeles, neuroscientist Michelle Craske and her colleagues. They’ve worked to unpackage the mechanisms behind exposure therapy, a common treatment for anxiety disorders that involves repeated exposures to things that a person fears or avoids. It works for some people, but not everyone. Craske and her colleagues are hunting for ways to tweak the treatment’s mechanisms to make exposure therapy more effective.

“If you can back translate the successful treatments we have, it can allow you to ask questions about how to extract the essential ingredients and make them better,” said Holmes.

Related:
With data from 2,000 brains, new studies explore origins of psychiatric diseases
Williams does her own type of back-translating. Patients who come into Stanford’s precision psychiatry studies go through a battery of tests: They undergo genetic testing and functional MRI scans to capture images of their brain circuitry. They’re evaluated on emotional regulation. They’re quizzed about their symptoms and their quality of life. Then, after weeks of treatment with existing drugs or therapies, they do it all again to see what changed.

Williams and her colleagues use those measures to come up with more precise subtypes of depression and anxiety. They’re also testing whether they can achieve better outcomes when treatment is guided by that testing.

“The best way to reduce the impact of the illness is to get treatment right the first time,” Williams said.

Welchman of Wellcome said he hopes the investment will ultimately produce better treatments for the tens of millions of people across the globe with mental health conditions. The organization is additionally dedicating some of its funding to develop common standards for how anxiety and depression are evaluated, so it’s easier to compare data across different projects. Wellcome is also aiding efforts to create a sweeping database of mental health research that lets researchers mine for patterns.

The investment is still in the early planning stages. But in the meantime, experts are excited that back translation is gaining traction.

“The Wellcome investment comes at a brilliant time,” said Holmes. “The really exciting thing is to have lots of people asking questions in novel ways.”


It's not directly relevant to ME, but might have some bearing on whether CBT works for depression and if so shows neural changes.
I guess I'm hoping that it might be useful in the UK fight against the psychs emphasis on CBT for ME.
Probably a long shot.

 

Ah, I see. I do think it's an interesting study in that people who examine mental health conditions seem pretty subjective in how they measure results. This is challenging that paradigm, which can only be good. I do worry that they may not know what they're looking at re: the MRI. In my novice opinion, neural scans are over-interpreted in studies. We don't know much about what we're actually looking at, and that unfortunately means that the neuroscientist can be prone to seeing what they wish to see.

 

as Jaime s says we need better tools to analyse the human brain while it is functioning a far better understanding of the complexity of brain chemistry not another bunch of people putting their own pet theories to test