CHARLOTTE CHURCH SEARCHES FOR MENTAL HEALTH ANSWERS
A WORLD-FIRST scan of a live brain carried out in Cardiff, showing how neural circuits interact, could one day help diagnose mental health disease.
The technique and other new treatments are investigated by singer Charlotte Church in a programme exploring depression and other mental illnesses.
Having watched her mother battle mental health problems, Church wanted to look at research into new cures.
She said: "It's a subject that is close to my heart."
In Charlotte Church: Inside My Brain, the singer meets Dr Chantal Tax from Cardiff University's Brain Research Imaging Centre (Cubric), which has created the brain connection imaging technique.
Dr Tax calls it a "road map" of the brain, adding: "It's like an image of the wiring of the brain. With this technique we can finally look into a living brain.
"It's really important to study the wiring and more specifically to study if that wiring is still intact, if there is still information flowing through there." Cubric is analysing lots of people with and without mental health problems to pinpoint which neural circuits are involved.
Dr Tax says: “Possibly in the future it might become the case that we can get a new patient in and can give a more specific diagnosis based on the knowledge that we gain now.”
In another part of Cardiff University, Dr John Atack is working on new drugs to treat psychiatric illnesses.
Church finds out one third of people on commonly-prescribed selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and other antidepressant drugs do not respond to them at all.
Dr Atack tells her: “We lack a basic understanding of what’s going on in the brains of people with depression.