Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Friday June 26 2015, @07:45PM   Printer-friendly

Wired reports:

A brain surgeon begins an anterior cingulotomy by drilling a small hole into a patient's skull. The surgeon then inserts a tiny blade, cutting a path through brain tissue, then inserts a probe past sensitive nerves and bundles of blood vessels until it reaches a specific cluster of neural connections, a kind of switchboard linking emotional triggers to cognitive tasks. With the probe in place, the surgeon fires up a laser, burning away tissue until the beam has hollowed out about half a teaspoon of grey matter.

This is the shape of modern psychosurgery: Ablating parts of the brain to treat mental illnesses. Which might remind you of that maligned procedure, the lobotomy. But psychosurgeries are different. And not just because the ethics are better today; because the procedures actually work. Removing parts of a person's brain is always a dicey proposition. But for people who are mentally ill, when pills and psychiatry offer no solace, the laser-tipped probe can be a welcome relief.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 28 2015, @12:13AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 28 2015, @12:13AM (#202268)

    I've learned you have to be careful with what these biologists/medical researchers claim. Often the evidence can be interpreted differently but they do not investigate these alternatives. It is also common for there to be blatant conflicting aspects of the data that go ignored or get hidden by averaging. So I tried to find the earliest paper identifying a serotonin transporter which I believe is ref 1.

    I'm not sure if you have access but check out the dose-response curves of various SSRIs in figure 2b of ref [1]. Those are all quite steep, what are the hill coefficients? The authors do not appear interested in this inconvenient aspect of the data. Also the Km for serotonin was only 320 nM, which is quite low affinity. What is the extracellular concentration of serotonin in the brain (quickly checking a few papers it looks like that is 1-20 nM)[2][3]? Back to ref [1], there are other issues. They do not tell us whether the treatments had any effect on cell growth or survival. The more cells and larger cells, the larger the intracellular volume exists to hold the serotonin.

    I have no idea if these issues have been resolved in later work, but I would warn you against assuming that the textbook is anywhere near correct. It is unfortunate, but you simply need to go check the actual evidence available for each claim that is made and decide for yourself whether it is reliable. This wastes tons of time, but there is no alternative. Peer review has not been functioning for many years when it comes to medical research.

    [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1944572?dopt=Abstract [nih.gov]
    [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=1895110 [nih.gov]
    [3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10063489 [nih.gov]