A new study has revealed an interesting link between brain disruptions in certain regions and the onset of six mental health conditions. The research, conducted at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, looked at the medical records of 194 Vietnam War veterans who had suffered physical brain injuries and were more likely to be diagnosed with multiple mental health conditions. Additionally, the team looked at 193 brain-scanning studies involving nearly 16,000 people.
The findings suggest that individuals with any of the six mental health conditions - depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, addiction, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) - tended to have shrunken tissue in the regions at the front or in other areas linked to them. This indicates that problems within the same brain network may be involved in the onset of these conditions, and that different mental illnesses may all have a shared underlying cause, or ‘p factor’.
Joseph Taylor of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston suggests that boosting brain activity in the posterior regions using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation may be a potential treatment for mental illnesses. Though the findings are promising, further research is needed to explore the potential of this approach and verify the connections between the brain network and mental health conditions.