"My major concern is that they defined the regions of interests [regional masks that you superimpose on the data to obtain the average activity for an area of interest], based on the pixel-by-pixel analysis. In particular the used the voxels where they saw an interaction in the first study to look at activity after 8 […]
Psychiatry’s identity crisis Editorial The Lancet. 2012 379:9823:1274. Last week, the American Psychiatric Association issued a press release highlighting an ongoing decline in the recruitment of medical students into the specialty—at a time when the numbers of practising psychiatric professionals in the USA is falling. Various reasons are proposed, including the short-term nature of placements […]
"…this research provides a powerful message that clinicians can give to families: adolescents with depression have abnormal neural circuitry, and treatment with fluoxetine will make the circuitry normal again." "Mapping out these biomarkers will be the key to enabling the clinical advancements needed to allow patients to achieve remission in the earliest phase of illness, […]
In my post on the neuroimaging study of depressed kids [wary skepticism…], I deliberately avoided the accompanying editorial that went with it. After all, it is a holiday, but it needs mentioning. From my reading, Dr. Tao’s study [Brain Activity in Adolescent Major Depressive Disorder Before and After Fluoxetine Treatment] is hardly definitive, and colored […]
I found my thoughts traveling down an odd path recently. It started by thinking about the returning soldiers I saw after the Viet Nam War and the few I’ve seen recently from our contemporary wars. Early on, I was surprised to find that often the hardest part was not what had happened to them in […]
We read "recent advances in neuroimaging…" all the time, so I thought I’d take a look. And what could be more recent that this month’s American Journal of Psychiatry? Brain Activity in Adolescent Major Depressive Disorder Before and After Fluoxetine Treatment by Tao R, Calley CS, Hart J, Mayes TL, Nakonezny PA, Lu H, Kennard […]
Remember Arkansas? There’s a Janssen Risperdal Trial underway having completed its second week. Since I heard the plaintiff’s argument in the Texas Trial in January, I didn’t pay much attention except to notice that there was no news coming our way. Actually, the trial itself didn’t have a lot of appeal. No whistle-blower. No TMAP. […]
Before coming into psychiatry in the mid 1970s, I read the contemporary Freedman and Kaplan’s Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry. It said that Adolf Meyer was the Father of American Psychiatry, and I saw him primarily as a historical figure. He introduced the work of Emil Kraepelin to the US. He brought Freud and Jung to […]
Research Domain Criteria – RDoC NIMH – Director’s Blog by Thomas Insel March 06, 2012 While basing diagnosis exclusively on signs and symptoms was typical of mid-twentieth century medicine, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, most disciplines had built many other sources of information, such as biomarkers, into their diagnostic toolkits. Imagine diagnosing heart […]
I’ve been thinking about why the DSM-5 deliberations about the Bereavement Exclusion sticks in my craw. It really shouldn’t matter, since it doesn’t matter when I see a patient. I don’t really add up symptoms to see if they support a DSM-IV diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder to decide about what to do. So why […]