Using Brain-Based Phenotyping to Improve Discovery in Psychiatry

Many lines of evidence from different laboratories are now joining the same chorus: that conventional psychiatric diagnoses of serious mental illness (SMI), when tested, do not show a common biology. The article by Wolfers et al notes that SMI diagnoses do not have strong biomarkers similar to those that are already increasingly valued in the rest of medicine and that could help define disease groups, select treatments, and mark clinical outcomes. The authors used innovative regional brain structure mapping on an individual basis in people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and developed voxel-by-voxel measures of individual brain structure deviations from a normative model. They calculated group-level volume values for brain regions in a usual fashion, and then they derived deviations from the normative model, voxelwise, for each participant and each diagnostic group. Their calculations of individualized voxel-wise maps of deviance from the normative model allow the comparison of this individual deviance within and across diagnostic groups.
Source: JAMA Psychiatry - Category: Psychiatry Source Type: research