Those of you who are interested in what goes on in the brain related to OCD symptoms may be curious about the findings of a couple of neuropsychiatrists in Amsterdam. They found a way to monitor neural activity in people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) who are being treated by way of electrical brain implants, or deep brain stimulation.
The activity of implanted brain electrodes has a calming effect on the symptoms of some people with severe OCD. Brain stimulation is also being used to reduce symptoms of Parkinson’s, epilepsy, and depression as well but is still considered an experimental treatment since why it helps, and why it does not help everyone, is little understood.
However, the Dutch researchers Damiaan Denys and Martijn Figee are working to help solve this puzzle. Their monitoring suggests that when a person is engaged in compulsive behavior, there is an excessive amount of neural chatter between the brain’s nucleus accumbens and the prefrontal cortex. Deep brain stimulation somehow disrupts the over-communication between these two areas.
Accumbens and Prefrontal Cortex Chatter
Each side of the human brain contains a nucleus accumbens. The accumbens is a bunch of neurons that contribute to our experience of pleasure, reward, fear, aggression, and addiction. The neurotransmitters GABA and dopamine are significant players in this region of our brain.
Our prefrontal cortex is active when we decide whether to do something. It plays a role in planning, goal setting, and higher levels of cognition or thinking.
If the accumbens and prefrontal cortex are relaying too much information to each other, it's easy to imagine how this can create a problem. Maybe they are both firing away and neither one is “listening,” rather like two people having a heated discussion or argument; and sometimes OCD does feel like an argument going on in the head.
Re-synchronization
The researchers Figee and Denys believe their study, done using MRI technology, strengthens the idea that deep brain stimulation works by re-synchronizing, or re-synching, our brain circuitry. It somehow normalizes troublesome oscillations between brain regions.
Findings such as this may also enable doctors to some day diagnose mental health problems by reading the signature of our brain activity.
Source: MIT Technology Review
