Pure Pedantry : Brain blood flow helps treat depression, keep brain alive

Reality is always more complicated than you think.

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Jake Young is a MD/PhD student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine focusing in Neuroscience. He is due to graduate in 2032. He received a BS and a MS in Biological Sciences from Stanford University -- where he spent most of his time drinking heavily and building vegetable catapults instead of learning information that would now be eminently useful. When he is not failing terrifically to perform his sworn duties, he enjoys watching bad movies, ethnic food, and running.

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Brain blood flow helps treat depression, keep brain alive

Category: Bad Science Journalism • Neuroscience
Posted on: August 14, 2007 7:43 AM, by Jake Young

This has got to be the dumbest article I have ever read.

The headline reads: Brain blood flow helps treat depression.

Well, yeah. Try having a brain without blood flow, and you will be pretty depressed too.

It gets better. Here is what the article says:

Israeli scientists have confirmed the usefulness of established molecular imaging approaches in the treatment of depression.
"Individuals in a depressed emotional state have impaired cerebral blood flow," said Associate Professor Omer Bonne at Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem. "Clinical improvement in depression is accompanied by diverse changes in cerebral blood flow, according to whether patients are treated with medication or electroconvulsive treatment."

The researchers found antidepressant medicines normalized decreased brain blood flow in patients with depression, while electroconvulsive treatment was associated with additional decreases in blood flow.

"Currently, clinical psychiatry is based almost solely on subjective observer-based judgment," said Bonne. "Our findings suggest that objective imaging evaluations could support subjective clinical decisions."

The study appears in the August issue of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine.

Wait, that's it?

So I assume that the journal article that they are referring to is an fMRI or a PET study where they gave the subjects antidepressants and found that a reduction in blood flow observed in the patients was improved. But they don't say any of that. Nor do they mention which areas of the brain are affected. This article says basically nothing.

Comments

Heh, bad reporting at its best. :)

The original press-release (inludes the study at the bottom) popped up on EurekAlert several days ago. It was published in the August edition of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine.

The team used SPECT to create their images. Depressed patients were compared to controls and found descreased blood flow in frontal, limbic and subcortical regions.

Posted by: Zachary Tong | August 14, 2007 9:58 AM

Fully agree, I gave it a try on my blog, hope you like it. With pictures.

Posted by: Dr Shock | August 14, 2007 3:49 PM