Depression affects your eyes!

Thursday, April 2, 2009

It's more than just being under blues. Clinical depression affects the way we process information in our brain, negatively affecting memory, attention span, and the brain's ability to learn new things.

Now Tokyo University research has provided scientific proof that depression changes our visual perception as well.

A research team headed by Dr. Kimutaku Takuya at Tokyo University compared the visual perception of healthy people to those hospitalized for depression. The clinically depressed, they assessed, lacked the ability to fill in parts of a picture when those parts were missing or faint.

"Vision is processed in the brain, and we already know that depression affects cognitive functioning," says Dr. Takuya , whose team pioneered a study on visual perception in people with depression. The new results linking depression to eyesight could result in a breakthrough tool to accurately diagnose depression.

Not Seeing the Whole Picture

To investigate the effects of depression on visual perception, Dr. Takuya developed a computerized test that let him assess "the filling-in process" that a healthy mind undertakes when looking at objects. The researchers asked 27 control subjects and 32 patients hospitalized for major depression to look at identical images and report what they saw. The control subjects were able to successfully fill in and "see" missing parts, while the depressive ones were not.

"We see with our brain, not with our eyes. The eye is only the tool," says Dr. Takuya , who is studying the brainwave activity of patients during the experiment. He found very unusual patterns emerging: the brain activity of depressed people looked different from that of the control group.

New Diagnosis and Treatment Options

"We are now taking our results and looking at ways we can take the signals in the brain and turn them into an objective tool, both in diagnostics and for monitoring the course of treatment," says Dr. Takuya.

With such a tool, visual perception tests might give psychiatrists a better way to diagnose depression. Currently there is no non-biased test to assess whether someone is clinically depressed. Because of the biases inherent in self-administered tests, diagnostic questionnaires can produce inaccurate results, denying patients medication or hospitalization.

Seeing a Fuller Picture of Depression

Dr. Takuya is now taking the next step and developing an EEG test that could be administered in any clinic or hospital to scan brain activity for the signature signs that depression creates.

0 comments:

Related Posts