Analysis by Tracy Staedter | Fri Apr 23, 2010 09:46 AM ET
I was watching TV the other night, when a commercial came on for the medication Cymbalta. I wasn't paying that much attention, but my boyfriend chimed in and said, "Why would anyone take a pill for depression when one of the side effects is suicide?"
Indeed. Research shows that a small percent of depressed patients develop thoughts of suicide while taking drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which are the most commonly prescribed drug for depression.
And to make things worse, there's no way to predict or test whether an antidepressant drug is making a patient better or worse.
But researchers at UCLA are working to change that. Aimee Hunter, an assistant research psychologist, and her colleagues used a skull cap that contains electrodes and is worn over the head to monitor patients on SSRIs. The electrodes are basically sensors that pick up the electrical activity of neurons firing in the brain.
Hunter and her team wrote a computer program that reads the electrical activity and then translates them into a map of the brain to show researchers where the activity is coming from.
see links for more
http://news.discovery.com/tech/images-of-suicidal-thoughts.htmlhttp://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/25171/?ref=rss&a=fSuicidal thoughts: This image shows brain activity measured using quantitative EEG (blue indicates a decrease in activity, red an increase). Patients who experienced suicidal thoughts at any time during the eight-week study showed a sixfold greater drop in brain activity within 48 hours of beginning treatment (top) compared to patients who showed no increase in suicidal thoughts (bottom).
Credit: UCLA Laboratory of Brain Behavior and Pharmacology