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“New insights into brain changes and their effect on well-being”
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Associate Professor Miriam Klein-Flügge and colleagues analyzed brain connectivity and mental health data from nearly 500 people. In particular, they looked at the connectivity of the amygdala, a brain region known for its importance in processing emotions and rewards. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to consider seven small subdivisions of the amygdala and their associated networks rather than combining the entire region as previous studies had done.
The team also took a more precise approach to data on mental well-being, looking at a large group of healthy people and using questionnaires that captured information on well-being in the social, emotional, sleep, and anger domains. This generated more precise data than much research that still uses broad diagnoses like depression or anxiety, which involve many different symptoms.
The article, published in Nature Human Behavior, shows how the improved level of detail on brain connectivity and well-being made it possible to characterize the exact brain networks that relate to these different aspects of mental health. The brain connections that mattered most in discerning whether an individual was struggling with sleep problems, for example, looked very different from those that contained information about the individual’s social well-being.
Associate Professor Miriam Klein-Flügge of Department of Experimental Psychologybased on the Integrative Neuroimaging Welcome Center (WIN)said: “Understanding how changes in the brain are related to changes in well-being is an important step on the way to more targeted mental health treatments.”
“We look at the brain in much finer subdivisions than previous research, which more closely resembles how the brain is organized, and our findings indicate that it may one day be possible to develop very precise, non-invasive ways to target specific areas of the brain.” brain, making future treatments much more refined.’
The researchers also found that the nature of the identified brain networks differed. For example, they found that connectivity in evolutionarily older subcortical circuits was most strongly related to the tendency to experience negative emotions, while amygdala connectivity to both newer and older subcortical cortical circuits clearly contributed to social well-being.
The findings indicate the potential benefit of considering mental well-being and the brain networks involved on a finer scale than before, a scale that more closely resembles the functional organization of the brain. Although more research is needed, in the future it may be possible to target treatments to the brain circuits most relevant to an individual’s key symptoms. This possibility is becoming more tangible with current progress in non-invasive methods of deep brain stimulation like ultrasound, for example.
Reference: Klein-Flügge MC, Jensen DEA, Takagi Y, et al. Relationship between amygdala-specific connectivity of nuclei and dimensions of mental health in humans. Nat Hum Behavior. 2022. doi: 10.1038/s41562-022-01434-3
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