fMRI may reveal depression ‘subtypes’ and treatments that could work Premium

New study identifies six subtypes of depression based on brain activity, guiding personalized treatment options for mental health.

Antidepressants and therapy can provide much needed relief to people with mental health illnesses.

But there are many people whose symptoms don’t respond to treatment and whose road to recovery often begins after trial and error with different medicines and/or modes of therapy. And in this time their symptoms could get worse. According to one estimate, people with such treatment-resistant depression make up 30% of seekers of mental healthcare.

A recent study by an international team of researchers, published in Nature Medicine,offers a solution — and it requires reimagining psychiatric diagnoses.

“The way we think about depression in the clinic is it’s one label,” Leonardo Tozzi, a neuroscientist and the study’s first author, said. He was at Stanford before he joined a neurodiagnostics firm in the U.S. last year.

The brain is the seat of our mind and people with depression manifest it in their brains in different ways. These manifestations appear as faulty brain patterns that, the study’s researchers said, psychiatrists often don’t account for.

Dr. Tozzi et al. showed these patterns can be grouped into six unique subtypes of depression. The team also found at least three of these subtypes could predict the antidepressants and/or the modes of therapy that may work to treat these people.

Dr. Tozzi joined Stanford Medicine’s Center for Precision Mental Health and Wellness as a postdoctoral researcher in 2018. He likened the study’s purpose to cardiologists using electrocardiogram data to evaluate a patient’s heart condition. “We’re trying to turn psychiatry into that.”