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New Brain Scans Can Spot PTSD
Neuroscientists think they may have found a scientific method to identify post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) using a brain imaging method called magnetoencephalography (MEG). In the test study, the scientists studied 74 vets with PTSD and 250 civilians without and were able to spot the PTSD sufferers with 90% accuracy. "MEG machines are a fast, sensitive and accurate way to measure electric activity in the brain. Whereas CT scans and MRIs record brain signals every few seconds, MEGs can do it by the millisecond, catching biomarkers and brain activity that the other tests inevitably miss. The study could be a breakthrough for the military, who've been scrambling to address a surge in post-traumatic symptoms among newly returning vets. Right now, troops are evaluated by mental health experts, but diagnosis is a crap-shoot: symptoms can take years to show up, and vary from person to person, even among those exposed to the same traumas. The Pentagon's already been pushing for more objective, systematized diagnosis tools, like portable at-home sleep monitors and genetic testing to detect PTSD vulnerability. They've even launched a program to create stress-mitigating pharmaceuticals."
So if you are in the 10% that doesn't get detected you're SOL? I hope they can increase the accuracy of this.
> line 1: method magnetoencephalography(java/lang/String;) not found
MEGs can do it by the millisecond, catching biomarkers and brain activity that the other tests inevitably miss. How long until we have these in our airports?
Spotting 100% is easy: you just need a machine with a blinking light that says "PTSD". Unfortunately that puts a lot of healthy people in therapy.
Nobody expects Wired to figure that out, but the original press release (scavenged from the array of irrelevant links) doesn't say, either.
I assume that the actual article (in the Journal of Neural Engineering) actually says something about it. Anybody got a subscription?
"scientists studied 74 vets with PTSD and 250 civilians "
Is it possible that they aren't spotting PTSD but a wiring from a soldier? I am a civillian with NO military experience, but I do hang around several soldiers and police officers. Each group has similar mannerisms and they have ALL had similar experiences within that group (basic training for the green guys, the academy for the blue ones). I see a good chance that this new scan could be picking that up.
A more valid group would be:
- some vets without PTSD
- some vets with PTSD
- some civillians with PTSD
- some civillians without PTSD
Of those four groups some significant correlation would be helpful too. For example a set of soldiers from Afghanistan with and without PTSD. A set of civillians that had been through the same or similar trauma (say armed robbery or 9/11 or plane accident). Breaking it down by age would also be useful, a Vietnam veteran who has had a few years either with or without treatment would be a lot different than a recent return home from the Sandbox.
They've even launched a program to create stress-mitigating pharmaceuticals.
Sounds like something out of ST:TNG from the Q trial in the second episode. There is a drug available that helps mitigate the stress from a traumatic episode that was being tested a few years ago. I'm wondering if it's the same drug.
Either way, I think the way the gov't is treating our wounded vets is horrible. I really hope that the new test helps out better than what they're doing now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoencephalography
The key difference from other imaging technologies is that this is completely passive, it directly measures magnetic fields created by activity in your brain. To get accurate results with such tiny fields, it must be done in a magnetically shielded room with a large number of sensitive sensors.
It's interesting to me that there are new developments in PTSD treatment within less than a decade of of the declaration of 'car accident' being the #1 cause of PTSD. I mean, sure soldiers get it in wartime and 'police action' time, but when the car insurance companies start to lose money...then it's ON...
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Lewis Black made a very valid point in one of his routines about the disambiguation of this problem known as post traumatic stress disorder. Over time, it has gone from 'shell shock' to 'battle fatigue' to 'post traumatic stress disorder' and now to a simple acronym: PTSD. It's unfortunate, because the acronym carries none of the weight that the original name (shell shock) used to carry. I won't go so far as to say that we are moving to something like Newspeak and the "destruction of words" (Syme, character from Orwell's 1984), but this cannot be good, especially not for the poor souls afflicted with it.
If the test labels you as having PTSD, what will become of you? For example, will you forfeit your second amendment rights?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
AFAIK stress mitigating pharmaceuticals have been in use by both civilians and military for thousands of years... check out: this
For such an interesting result, its a bit surprising that they went for "The Journal of Neural Engineering". Impact factor = 2.7. Only been around since 2004. I don't want to denigrate science that gets published in lower-impact journals (because lots of good stuff ends up there), but the impact here is not congruous with the potential scientific and social ramifications of the results. I think some of the issues raised above might have something to do with it.
Seriously, Slashdot moderation has become a wretched hive of reactionary scum who downmod anything they don't want to hear. The parent post is far from being a troll.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I wonder if it can tell if you were in a bad marriage for 15 years with a banshee from the netherworld?!
The Thing is.
This is a very helpful diagnostic tool as there is still a stigma associated with any sort of mental disorder, particularly in the military. Some subsets handle it better than others; while some groups are more in the mindset of "get it treated" the idea of "malingerers" still holds true in some places. Self-diagnosis lags when there's a stigma attached.
I would also be interested to see this used to help diagnose sexual trauma. Among the female population of the military, rape is still the highest inducer of PTSD, and I'm sure that holds true for civilians as well.
The biggest reason for PTSD is that we, as humans in general, are not wired to cope with extreme trauma. Nor are we particularly wired to cause death. We train our military to automate these actions but in some people the brain can't cope with what the body has done. Look up "Achilles in America" for more information on the subject— there have been many studies done in and out of the military, and there are quite a few higher-ups who want to see the best treatments possible— and some who are looking into ways to mitigate the effects before they occur.
Actually I am a lab rat in an elaborate plot to take over the world.
What about scanning vets without ptsd, or civilians like cops with it? Even better, scan a lot of soldiers before they leave, and scan for differences when they come back. Note ptsd sufferers.
As their experiment stands currently, they might have only discovered a difference between a military-trained brain and a civilian one.
To launch headlong into the most expensive, unworkable, unreasonable, ill-thought, entirely not-researched solutions. I'm not talking so much about the brain scan here; Harvard came up with the idea that PTSD could be detected in the brain, along with bi polar disorder and a few other conditions which might have detectable pathologies, and it's a very good idea.
What's a very bad idea is the notion that PTSD can be stopped, or at least mitigated with chemical or mechanical tools. Once you already have PTSD, or indeed any disorder on the dissociative scale (Howell, Chu), then there is some good evidence that pharmaceuticals can help mitigate some, but not all of the symptoms. Currently those pharmaceuticals fall into two major classes: sedative-hypnotics and atypical antipsychotics. Sedative-hypnotics, particularly benzodiazepines, cause massive problems with the creation of short term memories. Atypical antipsychotics have a host of horrible side effects, from flattened affect to tardive dyskenisia-- which is the permanent, uncontrolled flexing of small muscles, like facial tics, thumb-wiggles and circles, and shuffling gait. In short, they should not be used for any condition which is not treatable by any other means.
Also, there is no evidence (as has been noted by Harvard, at least) that there is any sort of genetic pre-disposition to the development of PTSD, or any other environmentally caused dissociative disorder. That is a dead end.
Furthermore, there is also absolutely no evidence that the pre-dosing of atypical antipsychotics or sedatives have any effect whatsoever on the development of PTSD, and in fact in both cases may very probably result in soldiers with far less willingness to shoot the enemy in the face than the military requires.
The fact is that the Pentagon is and has always created an enormous mess out of the minds that manage to survive their plans, and there's simply no way around it. It would be really great, I think, to come up with some way to make war more palatable for the people who have to be in it, but somehow the very root of the notion seems disingenuous.
War is fucking hell.
Well, there is a good argument FOR FBI+DEA domestic surveillance activities. That means they work! Still not okay with it, but thank you for easing my concern about them a bit.
I was going make a related point, but didn't want to be redundant, so I'm piggybacking on your post. My point is tangenial to yours. PTSD is not exclusive to the Military. Rape victims often have it, as one example of many. It is a non-linearity in the precognitive response mechanism of the brain (the Amygdala.) Furthermore, you can be a civilian who has it and go undiagnosed for your entire life. Typically the memories related to the cause of the PTSD are suppressed to the subconscious, and the sufferer only becomes conscious of them through various techniques for accessing the subconscious, including therapy, hypnotism, and meditation. Seperating them this way is a flaw on many levels including but not limited to the one you identified.
They need to compare those with PTSD to those without it, preferably with none of them having undergone the brainwashing/trauma of boot camp of any kind, Police, Military or other. Then they need to compensate for the fact that some "false positives" will not be false positives at all. If it really works they will see "false positives" when those affected by PTSD but undiagnosed are tested.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
If you suspect PTSD, you can just MRI their head. No need to look at the images; if they go apeshit as soon as the thing starts up, they've got PTSD. (if they go apeshit before it starts up, they're claustrophobic and you'll have to try something else).
That's not PTSD, that's schizophrenia.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
MEG is not new, it's over 40 years old.
Conceptually it's even older. It is the magnetic signals associated with the well known EEG 'brain waves', first recorded in 1928.
It is exactly and only the perpendicular to the EEG signals, and as such are analyzed in much the same way, and represent the same neural processes.
What good it is, is it can detect and localize 'dipole' generators in the folds of the cortex. Since the negative and positive ends of those are the same distance from the scalp, they balance out on EEG and can't be seen. The magnetic field to such a dipole is most prominent in this configuration.
The drawback is that detecting the ~10 femtotesla signals require massive shielding to prevent pretty much any near by electrical activity to interfere. With signals that weak, it's a good thing the magnetic field isn't reduced by the skull and scalp like EEG (by 3 orders of magntitude).
The detectors are superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDS). They require massive technical infrastructure and maintenance, ie. great expense.
Except for the localization noted, if MEG can do it, EEG can do it easier, cheaper (three orders of magnitude), faster (in terms of turnover), and operated by personnel with less training. There are portable EEGs capable of being operated in the field, but even a full size unit is about the size of a desktop computer and can be run off a laptop.
I'd be very interested to hear what TFA has to say about why MEG is necessary. Their 248 SQUID machine is high density, but so are the 256 electrode EEG that have been on the market for years. I'd also like to know exactly what the signals of interest are, so I can figure out how to pull it out of EEG with far less sophisticated equipment, such as exists in pretty much every VA neurology department.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
So I could prove the method I developed, to heal any mental disorder?
And prove that it’s way more efficient than anything classic psychology does?
Now if only I had access to such a device, and someone who knows how to use it...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Hi.
Thank you for sharing your story. I can't imagine what other difficulties you're going through besides the one you've mentioned, but I'm taking a wild guess here: it isn't easy being you.
And I don't think I can say anything other than this: I wish you the best of luck in living a happy, fulfilling live, whatever that means to you, and I hope your limitations won't get too much in the way of that.
This line stood out: "They've even launched a program to create stress-mitigating pharmaceuticals." Reminded me of the JoCo song "I Feel Fantastic", written as an accompaniment to Popular Science's article Will Drugs Make Us Smarter and Happier?.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.