Theodore Schwartz: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why do you think it’s so hard to find biochemical correlates of depression if it’s just a physical thing? I think we have some. There are medications that we take that are pretty effective at alleviating depression. The thing about medications and the biochemical part of it is that when you take a medication as a pill, it goes everywhere in your brain. Depression is probably only in certain places in your brain. There are only certain frontal lobe circuits that probably mediate the depression, but if you take a drug that alters a neurotransmitter in your brain as a pill, right now, that goes everywhere in your brain, so it’s going to have side effects. It’s not going to be selective for just the circuits that are causing the depression. There’s a new technique that we have, called focused ultrasound, which is a fascinating device where we can focus ultrasound beams through the skull into the brain and open up what’s called the blood-brain barrier. When I take a drug orally, take a pill, put an IV drug in, a lot of those drugs don’t get into the brain, because there’s protection, because the brain doesn’t want poison or toxins to influence the brain, so not everything gets in. You could imagine a time in the near future where you take a pill for depression that’s very effective, and then you do focused ultrasound, open up the blood-brain barrier only in those circuits, in those anatomic areas that are important for depression, and that drug will only get into those specific areas in very high doses. That could be a much more effective treatment than what we have now. GLP-1 drugs seem to have the potential to limit addictive behavior. What do you think we learned from that?…

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