Treatment Why are brain scans not used in diagnosis of psychiatric illnesses as an aid?

[Juicewrldfan]

Someone told me that it’s because you can’t see the level of nuerotransmitters outside of blue light but that doesn’t seem right. You can see the difference in brain structure. Yeah alone it’s not enough but surely it’s a helpful tool? And psychiatry needs all the tools it can get to come up with quicker accurate diagnosis.

Just an interesting read-

Forty years of structural brain imaging in mental disorders: is it clinically useful or not?

Structural brain imaging was introduced into routine clinical practice more than 40 years ago with the hope that it would support the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. It is now widely used to exclude organic brain disease (eg, brain tumors, ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

 

[Juicewrldfan]

Should I have put this in neuroscience instead? Mods?

 

[AlphaMethylPhenyl]

Given how little we know, most of the time fMRIs can't detect the neurological anomalies in mental illness. The knowledge we do have can largely only be applied by examining post-mortem subjects.

 

[Juicewrldfan]

Given how little we know, most of the time fMRIs can't detect the neurological anomalies in mental illness. The knowledge we do have can largely only be applied by examining post-mortem subjects.

Yeah that’s the conclusion I came to as well. Only really useful right now post mortem aside from maybe dementia and Alzheimer’s

 

[snmfmy]

Yeah that’s the conclusion I came to as well. Only really useful right now post mortem aside from maybe dementia and Alzheimer’s

Even if you can find things like lower sert binding affinity What does that mean?

Prior ecstasy users were found to be more well adjusted than the general population, yet they had persistently low SERT binding affinity.

And then gross changes to the brain like multiple sclerosis scarring may not cause any symptoms at all.

The level of scarring is not necessarily correlated to the severity of disease or symptoms.