Whether behavioral psychotherapy will be useful for a person with neurosis can now be determined using MRI.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which manifests itself in the form of obsessive thoughts that cause anxiety, which a person tries to get rid of by performing equally obsessive and tedious actions – “rituals”, is painful for the patient and in severe cases interferes with normal life, study and work. Typically, OCD is treated with cognitive behavioral therapy (and sometimes medication). The therapist tries to teach the patient how to cope with anxiety without resorting to “rituals”.
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Unfortunately, therapy does not help all patients, and then the disease returns. In addition, it can be expensive, not available or complicate the already difficult life of the patient. To be able to pre-assess the potential effectiveness of the therapy, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles performed brain scans of 17 OCD patients, aged 21 to 50, before and after a 4-week course of psychotherapy. Doctors then monitored their condition for the next 12 months.
“We found that CBT leads to an increase in the number of local connections between neurons in some areas of the brain, which increases the efficiency of brain activity,” says one of the authors of the study, Jamie Feisner (Jamie Feusner). However, within 12 months after therapy, the condition of patients who had a large number of such connections in the brain before therapy turned out to be worse than those who initially had fewer of these connections. The authors of the study suggest that some patients used psychological techniques that are usually taught in the course of therapy, and they did not specifically help them. In this case, therapy is unlikely to be able to give them something new.
Feisner notes that a CT scan only takes 15 minutes and is relatively inexpensive, especially when compared to long-term therapy. If psychotherapy doesn’t work, doctors can prescribe medication—antidepressants help with OCD.
Подробнее см. J. Feusner et al. «Brain connectivity and prediction of relapse after cognitive-behavioral therapy in obsessive-compulsive disorder», Frontiers in Psychiatry, May 2015.