Brain Scan Offers First Biological Test in Diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Scientific American – Psychiatry 1/22/10
Carina Storrs
J Neural Eng. 2010 Feb;7(1):16011. Epub 2010 Jan 20.
Georgopoulos AP, Tan HR, Lewis SM, Leuthold AC, Winskowski AM, Lynch JK, Engdahl B.
Traumatic experiences can produce post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) which is a debilitating condition and for which no biomarker currently exists (Institute of Medicine (US) 2006 Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Diagnosis and Assessment (Washington, DC: National Academies)).
Here we show that the synchronous neural interactions (SNI) test which assesses the functional interactions among neural populations derived from magnetoencephalographic (MEG) recordings (Georgopoulos A P et al 2007 J. Neural Eng. 4 349-55) can successfully differentiate PTSD patients from healthy control subjects.
Externally cross-validated, bootstrap-based analyses yielded >90% overall accuracy of classification.
In addition, all but one of 18 patients who were not receiving medications for their disease were correctly classified.
Altogether, these findings document robust differences in brain function between the PTSD and control groups that can be used for differential diagnosis and which possess the potential for assessing and monitoring disease progression and effects of therapy.
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Posttraumatic Stress Disorder is a mental illness occurring in 3.4 percent of men and 9.7 percent of women in the U.S. according to research estimates.
Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is a new technique of scanning the brain which measures the magnetic field created as electrical current passes between areas of the brain, The scanner captures a map of the brain’s electrical activity every millisecond. By comparison, functional magnetic resonanace imaging (fMRI) measures brain activity every three seconds.
MEG was able to identify 97 percent of patients previously diagnosed with PTSD through a standard question-and-answer interview. MEG scans found a pattern in 72 of 74 patients diagnosed with PTSD that was different from 250 healthy controls.
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What would have been interesting would be comparing the brain scans of patients diagnosed with PTSD versus the brain scan of patients with other DSM-IV diagnoses – such as depression, generalized anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia – to see if there is a difference in patterns between patients with each diagnosis.