Thursday, April 21, 2011

How Your Eyes May Hold the Key to the Best Treatments for Depression

There happens to be sad reality linked to treatments for depression. Only 50% of patients who undergo solutions such as cognitive therapy will likely realize positive improvements. Due to this fact, valuable therapeutic time, as well as, cash, flows straight down the drain while medical examiners try to find a successful solution.

For some time now, health care specialists have searched for a means to accurately estimate whether or not the patient will respond to specific treatments for depression.

In the case of cognitive therapy, research shows a brain diagnostic scan can usually be relied on to produce trusted results. Having said that, this specific tool is not practical for day-to-day use due to associated high costs, time problems and the complications which usually come with employing advanced technology.

The good news is, scientists from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pittsburgh have posted the results of their study in a previous edition of Biological Psychiatry indicating a possible method has possibly been identified.

Dr. Greg Siegle, that's a corresponding author on the research said, "We have shown that a quick, inexpensive, and easy to administer physiological measure, pupil dilation in response to emotional words, not only reflects activity in brain regions involved in depression and treatment response but can predict which patients are likely to respond to cognitive therapy,"

The manager of Biological Psychiatry, Dr. John Krystal said, "According to proverb, the eye is the mirror of the soul or, in this case, the brain. The essential finding of this study is that that activity in the brain's cortical emotion regulatory systems is strongly related to pupil size when people are viewing emotion-laden words. It is because of this relationship between eye and brain that pupil measurements predict the response to cognitive therapy."

Numerous depressed persons have difficulty controlling sad, pessimistic or irrational thinking and behavior, that has a adverse impact on their state of mind and anxiety levels. Among the more effective solutions for coping with this, cognitive therapy functions to reduce discomforts of depression by simply changing ways someone thinks. Authorities realize that a course of successful cognitive therapy normally takes approximately ten to twelve treatments carried out over a few weeks.

While this research still needs further systematic examination, like reproduction, it offers hope that this approach has potential for more universal use to enhance the response rates for some treatments for depression.

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