Amit Etkin
speaker
111 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2005
last heard Mar 2015
Amit Etkin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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disorder.
The study really came out of a pretty simple question we wanted to ask, which it turns out has just never been asked, and that is whether there's a common biological thread that runs through a range of mental illnesses.
As a field, we for 40 years have been acculturated to think that psychiatric disorders are things defined by checklists of symptoms, and implicitly that one disorder differs from another because of different checklists that you make criteria for.
categories are loosely defined.
Exactly.
In fact, as a clinician, I'm both a psychiatrist and a neuroscientist, I intrinsically feel in my interaction with patients that there are those similarities, but that's not really acknowledged in the diagnostic system or in how we even do science.
Or treat.
Well, actually, treatment is almost a little bit of an exception because we do have some of the same tools that we apply across the board.
Antidepressants are given for a range of conditions, antipsychotics for a range of conditions.
Cognitive behavioral therapy.
Exactly.
So what did you do?
So what we did is we gathered the entire literature across the entire world.
that looked at something very specific, which is brain structure, the amount of gray matter you have all across the brain.
And what we did is a meta-analysis, which is a quantitative way of putting together the data to say where in the brain are there increases or decreases, and in whom or in which disorders.
Exactly.
So we were looking at the amount of the cell bodies, the nerve centres, you were saying.
did you find when you brought the world's
The surprising finding was that there actually is a commonality, and in fact not just in random little bits of brain, but in one circuit, three brain regions, that we understand quite a lot about.
The circuit contains three regions, the anterior insula on both sides and the dorsal cingulate, which function together as essentially a warning flag for the brain.
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