A follow up article in Forbes to the "NIMH" Thomas Insel Article.
This little tidbit was interesting.
There is is a thread on this, I believe, the finding involved calcium channel function
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A follow up article in Forbes to the "NIMH" Thomas Insel Article.
This little tidbit was interesting.
Hi Jarod,
Yes, I agree with you. I think they will make a fundamental mistake if they think that psychiatric conditions start in the brain, or are caused by a malfunctioning brain. The malfunctioning brain has an alternative cause. I agree with you that any psychiatric symptoms are caused not by the brain but by the body as a whole. I hope that a focus on biological investigations will move them towards finding the causes, such as inflammation, genetic changes, epigenetics, endogenous viruses, exogenous viruses, faulty immune systems, etc. etc.
It is now universally acknowledged that many psychiatric illnesses are biomedical conditions, and I hope the proposed program will widen that to all psychiatric illness.
Personally, I view things like schizophrenia, autism and depression to all be biomedical conditions that need biomedical research.
It looks to me as if they are taking a step in the right direction. I hope so anyway.
Now Insel is translating that belief into action: the NIMH, based in Bethesda, Maryland, has decided to stop funding clinical trials that aim merely to ease patients’ symptoms. “Future trials will follow an experimental medicine approach in which interventions serve not only as potential treatments, but as probes to generate information about the mechanisms underlying a disorder”, he wrote in a 27 February blog postannouncing the move. This funding switch, which will affect grants due to be made in a few months’ time, intensifies the NIMH’s apparent shift in emphasis from abstract psychiatry to the neurobiological roots of disease.
History shows that Insel is not daunted by controversy. In April 2013, he raised eyebrows when he announced that the NIMH would stop using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5 (DSM-5), the latest version of the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic guide, to classify mental disorders (see Nature http://doi.org/rvd; 2013). The book’s definitions tend to lump patients together by symptoms, which often do not precisely map to what is wrong with their brains, he says. With this haphazard approach to trials, even if symptoms are alleviated, researchers still may not understand what caused them.
“We’ve studied drugs, not disorders — if you throw something at the wall, and P is less than 0.05, you win,” he says. Such thinking, he adds, wastes time and money.
But Harold Pincus, a psychiatrist also at Columbia University, cautions that the data-driven approach is not a sure thing. Focusing trials on more specific biological targets will require researchers to think very carefully about how they recruit and classify their research subjects.