By David Dobbs
When Helen Mayberg started curing depression by stimulating a previously unknown neural junction box in a brain area called Brodmann’s area 25—discovered through 20 years of dogged research—people asked her where she was going to look next. Her reaction was, “What do you mean, Where am I going to look next? I’m going to look more closely here!”
Her closer look is now paying off. In a series of papers last year, Mayberg and several of her colleagues used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to reveal the neural circuitry of depression at new levels of precision. This MRI technique illuminates the connective tracts in the brain. For depression, the resulting map may allow a better understanding of what drives the disorder—and much better targeting and patient selection for treatments such as deep-brain stimulation (DBS) that seek to tweak this circuitry.
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