Posted by Racer on May 29, 2007, at 13:49:48
In reply to To Racer, posted by deniseuk190466 on May 28, 2007, at 12:30:46
>
> Thanks, I was wondering if scans can actually show the neurons in the brain or do you have to actually take slices of the brain to actually see the cells? I was wondering if when they say that antidepressants increase neurogenesis, or when they say they downregulate other receptors, if they could actually see that happening.
>As I understand it, some studies use radioactive markers to record binding at various receptors, so in that sense they can see some of that happens in the brain. Obviously, those are heavy duty studies, and are not just standard operating procedure. I believe there's something similar going on in the studies showing neurogenesis, but I'm not quite sure what the mechanism is.
A lot of the studies, though, extrapolate from animal studies. They record blood flow patterns in the brains of mice or rats, then sacrifice them to see what's actually happened. Then they extrapolate that to humans with similar blood flow patterns.
poster:Racer
thread:759825
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20070524/msgs/760205.html