If a patient is diagnosed with depression which one of the either antidepressant or therapy would be suitable for the patient? Many would go for antidepressant undoubtedly and rarely go for therapy. There’s no evidence to prove that one of them is better than the other. But the new study has suggested that the efficacy of the treatment depends upon the brain activity of the patient.
Dr. Helen Mayberg, a professor of psychiatry at EmoryUniversity, recently published a study in JAMA Psychiatry that identified a potential biomarker in the brain that could predict whether a depressed patient would respond better to psychotherapy or antidepressant medication.
The patients whose brain region, anterior insula, were found to have low activity, they reacted effectively to CBT(cognitibe behavioral therapy) and those had high activity in insula reacted effectively to antedepressant. ( but this does not apply to psychotic depression)
In another multicenter study, Dr. Charles Nemeroff , then a professor of psychiatry at Emory and now at the
University of Miami, found that for depressed adults without a history of abuse, there was a clear ranking
order of treatment efficacy: Combined psychotherapy (using a form of cognitive behavior therapy) and an
antidepressant (in this case, Serzone) was superior to either treatment alone. But for those who had a history
of childhood trauma, the results were strikingly different: 48 percent of these patients achieved remission with
psychotherapy alone, but only 33 percent of these patients responded to an antidepressant alone. The combination of psychotherapy and a drug was not significantly better than psychotherapy alone.
Imagine if one day the brain scan wud be simple as finger print scan and according to your brain activity you would be prescribed either antedepressant or psychotherapy or both of it together. This would greatly reduce the trial and error approach of the doctors and save the patient from wrongful treatment.
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