Using MRI studies, scientists compared the brains of people with neuropsychiatric conditions and those without. They also studied how the brains within a certain neuropsychiatric cohort differed.
For many years, scientists have been studying the brains of people with neuropsychiatric conditions. A recent study from Nature Neuroscience has shed more light. Using MRI scans from multiple cities, researchers evaluated the brains of people with six neuropsychiatric conditions: ADHD, autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, and OCD. The researchers found that the diseased brains tended to show unusually large or small brain areas. In addition, within a category such as ADHD, brains differed in how they were affected. The same brain area was not always affected in patients with ADHD; rather, brain circuits seemed to be more overlapping in patients with a given condition. These results suggest that treatments need to target brain pathways, and not necessarily a single brain region.
