Scientists use brain stimulation to boost creativity, set stage to potentially treat depression

A UNC School of Medicine study has provided the first direct evidence that a low dose of electric current can enhance a specific brain pattern to boost creativity by an average of 7.4 percent in healthy adults, according to a common, well-validated test of creativity.

This research, published in the journal Cortex, showed that using a 10-Hertz current run through electrodes attached to the scalp enhanced the brain's natural alpha wave oscillations -- prominent rhythmic patterns that can be seen on an electroencephalogram, or EEG.
"This study is a proof-of-concept," said senior author Flavio Frohlich, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry, cell biology and physiology, biomedical engineering, and neurology. "We've provided the first evidence that specifically enhancing alpha oscillations is a causal trigger of a specific and complex behavior -- in this case, creativity. But our goal is to use this approach to help people with neurological and psychiatric illnesses. For instance, there is strong evidence that people with depression have impaired alpha oscillations. If we could enhance these brain activity patterns, then we could potentially help many people."
Frohlich, who is also a member of the UNC Neuroscience Center, is now in collaboration with David Rubinow, MD, chair of the department of psychiatry, to use this particular kind of brain stimulation in two clinical trials for people with major depressive disorder and premenstrual dysphoric disorder, or PMDD -- a severe form of premenstrual syndrome. Participant enrollment is now underway for both trials.
"The fact that we've managed to enhance creativity in a frequency-specific way -- in a carefully-done double-blinded placebo-controlled study -- doesn't mean that we can definitely treat people with depression," Frohlich cautioned. "But if people with depression are stuck in a thought pattern and fail to appropriately engage with reality, then we think it's possible that enhancing alpha oscillations could be a meaningful, noninvasive, and inexpensive treatment paradigm for them -- similar to how it enhanced creativity in healthy participants."
Brain Rhythms
At the center of Frohlich's research are neural oscillations -- the naturally occurring rhythmic electrical patterns that neurons generate and repeat throughout the brain. Alpha oscillations occur within the frequency range of 8 and 12 Hertz 9 (or cycles per second). They were discovered in 1929 by Hans Berger, who invented EEG. Alpha oscillations occur most prominently when we close our eyes and shut out sensory stimuli -- things we see, feel, taste, smell, and hear.
"For a long time, people thought alpha waves represented the brain idling," Frohlich said. "But over the past 20 years we've developed much better insight. Our brains are not wasting energy, creating these patterns for nothing. When the brain is decoupled from the environment, it still does important things."
When alpha oscillations are prominent, your sensory inputs might be offline as you daydream, meditate, or conjure ideas. But when something happens that requires action, your brain immediately redirects attention to what's going on around you. You come fully online, and the alpha oscillations disappear. Other oscillations at higher frequencies, such as gamma oscillations, take over.
Knowing this, other researchers began associating alpha oscillations with creativity. Frohlich set out to find evidence. His idea was simple. If he could enhance the rhythmic patterns of alpha oscillations to improve creativity, then it might be possible to enhance alpha oscillations to help people with depression and other conditions of the central nervous system that seem to involve the same brain patterns.
For three years, his lab has used computer simulations and other experiments to hone a technique to improve alpha oscillation.
For the Cortex study, Frohlich's team enrolled 20 healthy adults. Researchers placed electrodes on each side of each participant's frontal scalp and a third electrode toward the back of the scalp. This way, the 10-Hertz alpha oscillation stimulation for each side of the cortex would be in unison. This is a key difference in Frohlich's method as compared to other brain stimulation techniques.
Each participant underwent two sessions. During one session, researchers used a 10-Hertz sham stimulation for just five minutes. Participants felt a little tingle at the start of the five minutes. For the next 25 minutes, each participant continued to take the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, a comprehensive and commonly used test of creativity. In one task, each participant was shown a small fraction of an illustration -- sometimes just a bent line on a piece of paper. Participants used the line to complete an illustration, and they wrote a title when they finished.
In the other session each participant underwent the same protocol, except they were stimulated at 10 Hertz for the entire 30 minutes while doing the Torrance test. The tingling sensation only occurred at the start of the stimulation, ensuring that each participant did not know which session was the control session.
Because rating creativity or scoring a test can involve subjectivity, Frohlich sent each participant's work to the company that created the test. "We didn't even tell the company what we were doing," Frohlich said. "We just asked them to score the tests."
Then Frohlich's team compared each participant's creativity score for each session. He found that during the 30-minute stimulation sessions, participants scored an average 7.4 percentage points higher than they did during the control sessions.
"That's a pretty big difference when it comes to creativity," Frohlich said. "Several participants showed incredible improvements in creativity. It was a very clear effect."
Pattern Specific
But there was a question. What if the electrical stimulation merely caused a general electric effect on the brain, independent of the alpha oscillation? To find out, Frohlich's team conducted the same experiments but used 40 Hertz of electrical current, which falls in the gamma frequency band typically associated with sensory processing -- when the brain is computing what we see or touch or hear.
"Using 40 Hertz, we saw no effect on creativity," Frohlich said. "The effect we saw was specific to the 10-hertz alpha oscillations. There's no statistical trickery. You just have to look at each participant's test to see these effects."
Frohlich said he understood some people might want to capitalize on this sort of study to boost creativity in their everyday lives, but he cautioned against it. "We don't know if there are long-term safety concerns," he said. "We did a well-controlled, one-time study and found an acute effect."
"Also, I have strong ethical concerns about cognitive enhancement for healthy adults, just as sports fans might have concerns about athletic enhancement through the use of performance-enhancing drugs."
Instead, Frohlich is focused on treating people with depression and other mental conditions, such as schizophrenia, for which cognitive deficits during everyday life is a major problem.
"There are people that are cognitively impaired and need help, and sometimes there are no medications that help or the drugs have serious side effects," Frohlich said. "Helping these populations of people is why we do this kind of research."

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Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150416093823.htm

Pattern Recognition Technology May Help Predict Future Mental Illness in Teens

A technique combining computer-based pattern recognition and brain imaging data accurately distinguished teens at risk for mental disorders from those with low risk and may someday be useful in predicting risk in individuals, according to an NIMH-funded study published February 15, 2012, in the journal PLoS One.

Background

Research on risk for mental disorders generally describes risk factors that apply to groups. To date, no biological measures can accurately predict an individual’s risk of future mental disorders.
Mary Phillips, M.D., of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and colleagues evaluated the use of computer-based techniques that automatically find patterns in data—these techniques are collectively called machine learning—with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. The researchers obtained fMRI data from 32 teens, half of whom had at least one biological parent diagnosed with bipolar disorder and were therefore at genetic risk for future psychiatric disorders. The other half of teens had no history of mental disorders either personally or in their immediate families.
The teens’ brain activity was assessed as they identified the gender of actors depicting various emotional facial expressions (happy, fearful, or neutral) in a series of photographs. Previous research has linked various mental disorders, especially depression and bipolar disorder, with abnormal patterns of brain activity during this task. Based on this fMRI data, the researchers used machine learning to calculate each participant’s odds for future mental illness.
The participants were also assessed clinically and with fMRI at the start of the study, and clinically assessed again about two years later, on average. Long-term follow up is ongoing, with successive face-to-face assessments occurring every other year.

Results

Machine learning combined with fMRI accurately identified most of the healthy teens at genetic risk of future mental disorders vs. healthy teens with low genetic risk. Four of the 16 at-risk teens were misidentified as having low risk.
At the two-year follow up, none of the at-risk teens had developed bipolar disorder, but six were diagnosed with major depression or an anxiety disorder. Among all the at-risk teens identified through machine learning, these six had received the highest odds for belonging to the at-risk group.
Three of the four at-risk teens misidentified as belonging to the low risk group at the start of the study remained healthy at the second assessment. Clinical information for the fourth teen was not available at the time of follow-up.

Significance

Though still a very preliminary study, according to the researchers, machine learning combined with fMRI shows promise for predicting individual risk of developing future mental disorders, especially in at-risk populations.
The ongoing follow-up may also yield further insights into the relationship between depression, anxiety disorders, and bipolar disorder. Many studies have shown that bipolar disorder is often preceded by depression or anxiety disorders, and that these disorders may affect the course of subsequent bipolar disorder.

What’s Next

Larger studies using machine learning and fMRI will help to better define the extent to which pattern recognition techniques can accurately identify people at risk for future mental disorders. Research in this area may also inform early treatment or prevention efforts.
Source:  http://www.nimh.nih.gov/news/science-news/2012/pattern-recognition-technology-may-help-predict-future-mental-illness-in-teens.shtml

The Link Between Anxiety and Depression Disorder

Anxiety and depression disorders are not the same although there are similar elements. Depression generates emotions such as hopelessness, despair and anger. Energy levels are usually very low, and depressed people often feel overwhelmed by the day-to-day tasks and personal relationships so essential to life.
A person with anxiety disorder, however, experiences fear, panic or anxiety in situations where most people would not feel anxious or threatened. The sufferer may experience sudden panic or anxiety attacks without any recognized trigger, and often lives with a constant nagging worry or anxiousness. Without treatment, anxiety and depression disorders can restrict a person's ability to work, maintain relationships, or even leave the house.
Both anxiety and depression treatment are similar, which may explain why the two disorders are so often confused. Antidepressant medication is often used for anxiety and depression and behavioral therapy frequently helps people overcome both conditions.

What is Depression if not a Mental Illness?

Sometimes you might hear a person talking about mental disorders like depression or bipolar disorder without really understanding what they mean. What is depression? What is bipolar disorder? Why do we refer to these things as mental health issues or mental disorders rather than a medical disease? And does it matter what we call a thing?

Depression is a Mental Disorder, not a Disease

While psychiatric medications and their resulting television commercials in the 1990’s and this decade have done much to help people seek treatment for a mental disorder like depression, they haven’t done much to help people understand the complexities of things like “depression” and “bipolar disorder.” These things are called disorders, not diseases, for a reason. A disorder simply means something that is out of the ordinary, which depression and other mental disorders are. They are more specifically a cluster of symptoms that research has shown to correlate highly with a specific emotional state.

A medical disease, on the other hand, according to Webster’s, is

a condition of the living animal or plant body or of one of its parts that impairs normal functioning and is typically manifested by distinguishing signs and symptoms

Diseases are manifestations of a problem with some physical organ or component within the body. And while the brain is also an organ, it is one of the least understood and easily the most complex organ within the body. Researchers and doctors refer to a diseased organ when something is clearly wrong with it (via a CAT scan or X-ray or laboratory test). But with our brains, we have no test to say, “Hey, there’s something clearly wrong here!”
One could make the argument, as many have, that because brain scans show abnormalities in certain biochemical levels within the brain when they suffer from depression or the like, this “proves” that depression is a disease. Unfortunately, research hasn’t gotten quite that far yet. The brain scans show us something, that much is true. But whether the scans show the cause or the result of depression has yet to be determined. And more tellingly, there is a body of research that shows similar changes in brain neurochemistry when people are doing all sorts of activities (such as reading, playing a video game, etc.).

The Bio-Psycho-Social Model of Mental Disorders

While brain biochemistry and genetic makeup are important components of most people’s battle with a mental disorder, there are two other equally important components that are all too often left out of the picture – the psychological and the social. The most commonly accepted model of mental illness today takes these three components into account – the biopsychosocial model. This is the model most mental health professionals who practice subscribe to.
Source:  http://psychcentral.com/lib/what-is-depression-if-not-a-mental-illness/000896?all=1

Mental disorders and physical diseases co-occur in teenagers

Every third teenager has suffered from one mental disorder and one physical disease. These co-occurrences come in specific associations: More often than average, depression occurs together with diseases of the digestive system, eating disorders with seizures and anxiety disorders together with arthritis, heart disease as well as diseases of the digestives system. These findings were reported by researchers from the University of Basel and the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Their results based on data from 6,500 U.S. teenagers have been published in the scientific journal Psychosomatic Medicine.

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According to the WHO, chronic physical disease and mental disorders are challenging the health care systems and have advanced into the focus of public health authorities worldwide in recent years. Previous adult studies suggest that physical disease and mental disorders not only randomly but also systematically co-occur.
A research team led by PD Dr. Marion Tegethoff from the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Basel now analyzed how often and in what manner these associations already occur in children and adolescents. The study is part of a research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. For the study, the researchers analyzed data from a national representative cohort of 6,482 U.S. teenagers aged 13 to 18.
Depression comes with indigestion
The researchers found that more than a third (35.3%) of children and adolescents reported at least one mental disorder and one chronic physical disease. The strongest correlation was found between affective disorders (e.g. depression) and diseases of the digestive system. Adolescents with anxiety disorders were also suffering above-average from arthritis, heart disease and diseases of the digestive system. Similar correlations occurred between eating disorders and seizures (epilepsy). Factors such as age, gender or socioeconomic status of the adolescents did not account for these associations.
Due to the cross-sectional design of the study, the results do not show if and how mental disorders and physical disease are also connected causally. "Future studies should identify risk factors as well as the biological and psychological mechanisms responsible for these associations, in order to develop interdisciplinary approaches," explains Maion Tegethoff, first-author of the study. Such treatment should take into account both the physical disease as well as the mental disorder. This would lead to better health care for children and adolescents and would prevent unfavorable long-term effects for individuals as well as for the health care system in general.
Source:   http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150408085900.htm