Posted by Marty on September 13, 2008, at 23:46:35
In reply to Re: Bipolar Spectrum: Very long but very accurate. » Larry Hoover, posted by SLS on September 6, 2008, at 17:46:56
> Perhaps the key to choosing effective treatments is to be found in using microarrays to catalog gene activity. That is a hope of mine, anyway.
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It will be the key to the next evolution step in Psychiatry in the next 30 years OR it will be the revolution of psychiatry: a new medical domain will overlap and will end up displacing Psychiatry, just like Psychiatry somehow displaced Psychoanalysis and Psychology because it was more efficient.I thing THE key is to being able to make sense of what's going on in the brain IN REAL TIME. Based on the genopsychanalysis (made up word. Read 'gene analysis') results and the psychiatry (symptoms, history etc), a computer will determine what is of interest in the brain of the patient (regions, pathways, receptors, neurotransmitters etc). Then the patient will have his brain recorded ("taped"), at the determined and limited targets, in real time with a (yet to be invented) scanner. Later, a computer analyze the data and propose a treatment OR determine new targets to study, leading to another brain recording. Depending on the outcome of the treatment or the course of the illness in term of symptoms, the patient will eventuantly have his brain reanalyzed.
That was THE key for improving diagnostic and treatment prescription. But ultimately, as (I think) we already talk about together, the most important key in the future will be genetic therapy. Meanwhile I wouldn't say no to have an intermediate step between the 'Brain Analyzer' and genetic therapy: Based on the results of the brain analysis, the computer determine (analysis/simulations) the best molecules to treat the patient and send the molecules formula and synthetising step to a personalized pharmacology labs. :) .. which, hopefully, are so technologically advanced that they look at the 2000's pharmacological engineering tools with desdain and see nothing more than amateurish chemistry kits for kids. And so it doesn't cost you 50,000$ for your personalized drug.
Think it's science fiction ? In the computing science field, respected experts estimate that by 2035 we'll develop 'electronic brains' (read: computers) that will be as powerful as the human brain. By 2050, helped by those electronic brains, we would have electronic brains about 1000 time more powerful than our brain... put a couple of those to work together and you have something able to analyze about 1/10 of the brain at the molecular level at the speed of 1 minute of analysis for every second of brain activity..... maybe not exactly like that.. I just made up that part ;) but I'm sure that's not -THAT- far from what it could be.
Enough rambling.. Hope you're doing well Scott. Btw, what do you think of the DAOA thing ? I didn't research it a lot yet, but if you did I'd like to know if there's a rationale for trying to inhibit DAO, increasing DAO synthesis/effiency or neither of those strategies ... I think in the case of Schizophrenia they saw TWICE DAO activity than normal people, but I don't know for bipolars: hyperactivity, hypoactivity or aberant activity ?
/\/\arty
poster:Marty
thread:850483
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20080903/msgs/851876.html