Thread: Certainty
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Old Jul 03, 2017, 06:43 AM
Icare dixit's Avatar
Icare dixit Icare dixit is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bluebicycle View Post
Testing would be nice.

I presume the testing would include more than just a Dx, though. That is, if testing could diagnose the condition, you'd probably be able to find other useful information such as how your individual brain chemicals change. (I mean, you'd probably have to know that information in order to make the diagnosis anyway.) Knowing individual brain chemistry would probably help us figure out which meds might work best, BP or not. Basically, genetic testing, only more accurate.

So in theory, it'd probably be super expensive! And I don't know how invasive it would be.

I actually think it's quite possible to do this already though, but the diagnosis process wouldn't be so practical. It's probably a matter of monitoring brain activity (neuron firing) and brain chemical changes on a daily basis waiting for a chemical imbalance to occur. So... brain monitoring for X many days in a row. Lotsa money
It's not possible to measure/monitor brain chemistry. If it were, it would maybe work as you described, but even then it's hard to know what causes what, the aetiology.

At the moment, the best we can do is measure energy consumption, which is a rather crude guess as to which neurons (and glial cells) are firing at any one time. We have no idea how cells communicate exactly, we only know quite a lot about the medium, but not the "language", and we don't know which individual neurons communicate with other neurons (sometimes over long distances).

It's like a radar image of clouds and temperatures.

Nevertheless, if we'd define what BP is based on what we can measure, at least it could be proven that one has (or doesn't have) BP.

Maybe people are too much focused on finding a cause without actually knowing the effects.

A galvanometer on the skin and an ECG might be interesting to use at first. Maybe then a simple EEG that fits into a hat.

I wouldn't use MRI or fMRI because it's simply not sensitive enough (and, most importantly, not portable). Skin conduction, ECG and EEG aren't very sensitive either, but using fMRI is problematic also because, since it isn't portable and you can't use for months at a time, just minutes or hours, or in a natural environment, each person with BP would be in a different mental state. You would have to combine data of manic people with those of depressed people (and euthymic people, showing no symptoms at the time). Not surprisingly, the data would be roughly the same as that of "normal" people.

Edit:
Longitudinal MRI studies might work, though. But it would still be about effects, not the, probably manifold, root causes. Just to diagnose.
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Last edited by Icare dixit; Jul 03, 2017 at 07:46 AM.