A recent scientific study conducted by researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City and Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta revealed three neural pathways in the brain associated with sustained improvement in some patients with treatment-resistant depression, results that may help improve the precision of directing deep brain stimulation.
The scientific website Medical Xpress reported on Wednesday that Mount Sinai Health System announced the study results on October 13, noting that they were published in the American Journal of Psychiatry and identified three pathways in the brain's white matter associated with sustained improvement in some patients: the cingulum bundle, the small fronto-occipital fasciculus, and a pathway comprising the medial superior longitudinal fasciculus and the inferior longitudinal fasciculus.
For his part, the researchers clarified that identifying these pathways may help understand the differences in patient response to treatment and provide a basis for developing more precise methods for directing electrical stimulation, while emphasizing that the association of these pathways with improvement does not guarantee response in all patients and that further studies are required.
The study noted that treatment-resistant depression is depression whose symptoms do not improve sufficiently despite trying appropriate drug treatments, while deep brain stimulation relies on surgically implanting electrodes to stimulate specific neural circuits, and its use is being researched in some patients with severe depression who do not respond adequately to available treatments.
The results added that the move toward developing more personalized treatments is based on connectivity maps between brain regions to determine the positions of electrical electrodes more precisely, rather than relying solely on anatomical landmarks, while the need remains for further research to evaluate the effectiveness of this approach and identify the patients who benefit most from it.
Source: Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA)
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