Functional Brain Imaging Assessment Of Several Mental Health Problems Among Young Adults

Mental health problems of young adults are widely recognized and attended. However, the assessment methods of such problems still stay in the stage of the interview by psychiatrists and psychological counselors. Although this kind of interview has some subjective advantages which deal with the mental health problems professionally and specifically, but some questions have not been answered yet, such as how to quantitate the mental process, how to make the interview or psychological examination repeated, how to compare two mental processes and so on. In addition, since the psychological process is the mechanism of the brain, the interview can not present us the neurological data.Single photon emission computerized tomography (SPECT), the newly developed non-or tiny invasive functional brain imaging technique has been used to explore the brain function in vivo in this research. The specifically designed neuropsychological paradigm was also included. The brain images were attained through the brain image attaining and discriminating computing system, and then were processed by the Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM) on the basis of voxels. Anxiety, depression and eating disorder problems of young adults were assessed with these methods. Comparing to the healthy controls, the regional brain blood flow of those young adults with such mental health problems changes significantly. For example, the brain areas that relate to the 5-HT and dopamine functions have significant hypoperfusion or hyperperfusion in young adults with anorexia nervosa(AN), which indicates that AN's incidence is associated with the dysfunction of certain neurotransmitters and/or receptors, and AN is trait-related. Furthermore, young adults with mental health problems have cognitive deficiency in some extent. For example, when performing Go/Nogo tasks, the behavioral performance of young adults with anxiety and depression is significantly worse than healthy controls. Also, the regional altered brain blood flow of these people showed the dysfunction in the certain brain areas. Hyperperfusion can be found in the areas of anterior cingulated cortex and medial prefrontal cortex, lateral inferior prefrontal cortex, as well as posterior corpus callosum when Go/Nogo task is performed. This result suggests young adults with anxiety and depression problems also have behavioral inhibitory dysfunction, which is related to the deficiency in the certain brain areas. This paper not only described the application of functional brain imaging to young adults' mental health problems, but also illustrated the voxel-based data process methodology of functional brain data in large efforts. This research made a foundation of auxiliary diagnosis of mental health problems.