Dr. Damian Sendler’s research examines how psychiatric and chronic medical co-morbidities affect the use of medical services and internet-based health information. It’s important to understand everyone’s health information-seeking behavior because global consumption of internet news and social media is expanding exponentially. Dr. Damian Sendler’s research looks into how patients decide whether to seek therapy and how they stick to treatment.
Damian Jacob Sendler: In a pilot human study, researchers from the University of Minnesota Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital demonstrate that combining artificial intelligence with targeted electrical brain stimulation can improve specific human brain functions related to self-control and mental flexibility.
Damien Sendler: The senior author of the study published in Nature Biomedical Engineering is Alik Widge, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of psychiatry and member of the Medical Discovery Team on Addiction at the University of Michigan Medical School. The findings came from a human study conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston on 12 patients having brain surgery for epilepsy – a process that involves implanting hundreds of tiny electrodes throughout the brain to record its activity and pinpoint the source of seizures.
Damian Sendler: Widge worked on this study with Sydney Cash, MD, PhD, an epilepsy researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Darin Dougherty, MD, an expert in clinical brain stimulation. They discovered a brain region called the internal capsule that, when treated with modest amounts of electrical energy, enhanced patients’ mental function. That portion of the brain is in charge of cognitive regulation, which is the process of transitioning from one thought pattern or behavior to another, and is disrupted in the majority of mental diseases.
“A person suffering from depression, for example, may find it difficult to break free from a’stuck’ unpleasant thinking. Finding a technique to improve it could be a strong new way to treat mental problems because it is so essential to them “Widge stated.
Dr. Sendler: The team created algorithms that allowed them to track patients’ cognitive control abilities following stimulation, both through their actions and directly through their brain activity. When the patients performed poorly on a laboratory test of cognitive control, the controller approach gave additional stimulation.
“This device can read brain activity, ‘decode’ it to determine when a patient is having difficulties, and then administer a tiny burst of electrical stimulation to the brain to help them overcome that issue,” Widge explained. “An electric bike is an analogy I frequently use. When someone is cycling but experiencing difficulty, the bike detects this and helps them. We’ve created the equivalent for human mind function.”
A certain human mental function associated with mental disease can be successfully strengthened with precisely focused electrical stimulation; specific sub-parts of the internal capsule brain structure are particularly beneficial for cognitive enhancement. A closed-loop method utilized as a controller was twice as effective as random stimulation.
In addition to their seizures, some of the patients had substantial anxiety. They indicated that after receiving cognitive-enhancing stimulation, their anxiety improved because they were better able to shift their thoughts away from their distress and toward what they desired. According to Widge, this procedure could be utilized to treat people suffering from severe and medication-resistant anxiety, depression, or other diseases.
“This might be a completely different strategy to treating mental disease. Instead than suppressing symptoms, we may provide patients with a tool that allows them to take control of their own minds “Widge stated. “We could put them back in charge and give them a new sense of agency.”
Damian Sendler: Clinical trials are already being planned by the research team. Because the target for improving cognitive control has already been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for deep brain stimulation, Widge believes that once a trial is formally approved, this research can be done with existing tools and devices, and the translation of this care to current medical practice could be rapid.
“The beautiful thing about these findings is that we are now in a position to perform clinical studies to further demonstrate efficacy and, hopefully, move on to treating treatment-resistant patients who are in critical need of more therapies to address their illnesses,” Dougherty said.
Research discussion contributed by Dr. Damian Jacob Sendler
