Now brain scans give heads up on future health
Neuroimaging will allow doctors to construct accurate profiles, writes Claire Keeton
WANT to know if you are likely to stick to your New Year’s resolutions? In the future it could be possible to predict this with a brain scan. Neuroimaging is proving to be an accurate way of predicting health behaviour and individual learning.
A range of health issues had been researched using noninvasive brain imaging, said John Gabrieli of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including whether:
People in good health are likely to gain weight in the next year or use sunblock;
People are likely to quit smoking;
Adolescents will take up heavy drinking; and
People with psychiatric diagnoses such as depression and anxiety will respond to treatment.
“By knowing these things, we can do something about them,” said Gabrieli, professor of health sciences, technology and cognitive neuroscience at Harvard MIT.
In South Africa, brain research is being conducted at a world-class facility on the outskirts of Cape Town, the Cape Universities Brain Imaging Centre, or Cubic.
Cubic was the first facility in Africa to use high-resolution 3D brain imaging, now available at private radiological practices.
Brain measures “often provide better predictions . . . than traditional behavioural measures” when it comes to health and learning behaviours, Gabrieli’s team reported in a scientific paper published this week.
A study among dyslexic children, for example, proved neuro-markers to be more than 90% accurate “in predicting whether a given child would be in the improved reading group or the not-improved group two years in the future”, he said.
In contrast, more than a dozen established measures, such as IQ and reading ability tests, did not predict which poor readers would improve.
In the next five to 10 years, “responsible predictions” based on brain data and context could help to minimise or avoid failure among people at high risk. Personalised medicine or learning plans best suited to an individual could take shape.
“None of this requires the invention of new technology or drugs,” Gabrieli said.
“Currently, many decisions are made with virtually no solid information of what is likely to be helpful, so even imperfect progress may be useful in the foreseeable future.”
For example, most physicians make an educated guess about what treatment would work for depression. Only about 50% of patients benefit from the first set of drugs prescribed.
“The exciting thing is that in a series of studies, the brain measures, person by person, predicted much better than traditional measures whether a treatment will be effective.
“By knowing what treatment is unlikely to help, we can focus an another treatment,” said Gabrieli.
His team reviewed 72 neuroimaging studies in the journal Neuron, exploring the potential of brain markers to predict out- comes and thereby affect people’s lives.
The study results have “shown great promise for identifying children and adults more likely to learn well or poorly . . . more likely to progress to unhealthy (or even criminal) behaviours; and more likely to respond to particular pharmacological, behavioural, or placebo treatments”, they reported.
From April, Cubic would have a second 3D full-body scanner operational at Groote Schuur Hospital, said physicist Professor Ernesta Meintjes, the South African research chair in brain imaging.
The second Cubic campus would also be a National Imaging Facility, said Meintjes, who is based at the University of Cape Town’s biomedical engineering division.
The brain images allow scientists to study the structure and matter of the brain, how these change and how parts of the brain light up in response to specific tasks or drugs.
Dr Christelle Ackermann, act- ing head of the radiology department at Stellenbosch University and Cubic, said their research had focused on areas such as HIV/Aids, depression, alcohol addiction, psychotic disorders and schizophrenia.
“We have been studying how certain diseases and treatments affect the structure of the brain. Through cerebral imaging we can see responses to treatment. For example, when a person with HIV starts taking ARV [antiretroviral] treatment, we can see if damage that was present in the white matter [nerve fibres that transmit signals between cells] is no longer evident,” she said.
Brain scans of children with foetal alcohol syndrome showed that virtually their whole brains lit up to do very simple mathematical tasks, said Meintjes. Children without alcohol damage use only the specific regions normally associated with solving simple mathematical problems.
Dozens of papers have been published by Stellenbosch University and UCT scientists doing research at Cubic, and about 40 studies are being conducted at the centre.
Cubic regularly recruits volunteers for studies
Personalised medicine or learning plans best suited to an individual could take shape