Scans Show Weakened Brain Connections in Adolescents at Risk of Bipolar Disorder

upstart writes:

Scans Show Weakened Brain Connections in Adolescents at Risk of Bipolar Disorder:

A brain imaging study of young people at high risk of developing bipolar disorder has for the first time found evidence of weakening connections between key areas of the brain in late adolescence.

Up until now, medical researchers knew that bipolar disorder was associated with reduced communication between brain networks that are involved with emotional processing and thinking, but how these networks developed prior to the condition was a mystery.

[...] The researchers used diffusion-weighted magnetic imaging (dMRI) technology to scan the brains of 183 individuals over a two-year period. They examined the progressive changes in the brain scans of people with high genetic risk of developing the condition over a two year period, before comparing them with a control group of people with no risk.

People with a parent or sibling who has bipolar disorder are considered high genetic risk, and are 10 times more likely to develop the condition than people without the close family link. In the brain image scans of 97 people with high genetic risk of bipolar disorder, the researchers noted a decrease in connectivity between regions of the brain devoted to emotion processing and cognition during the two years between scans.

But in the control group of 86 people with no family history of mental illness, they observed the opposite: strengthening in the neural connections between these same regions, when the adolescent brain matures to become more adept at the cognitive and emotional reasoning required in adulthood.

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