Four Types of Depression Revealed By 1,100 Brain Scans

You have a 33% chance of depression after stroke. Does your doctor know which type you have and the treatment needed?
http://www.spring.org.uk/2016/12/types-of-depression.php?omhide=true

Brain scans of four different types of depression could aid in the diagnosis and treatment of the condition.

Four types of depression have been newly identified by researchers using brain scans.

The brain scans revealed distinctly different types of brain activity in each sub-type.
The finding may eventually lead to treatments targeted to the particular sub-type of depression.
Dr. Conor Liston, who led the research, said:

“The four subtypes of depression that we discovered vary in terms of their clinical symptoms but, more importantly, they differ in their responses to treatment.
We can now predict with high accuracy whether or not a patient will respond to transcranial magnetic stimulation therapy, which is significant because it takes five weeks to know if this type of treatment works.”

The four different types of depression they identified are:

• Biotype 1 is characterised by anxiety, insomnia, and fatigue.
• Biotype 2 is characterised by exhaustion and low energy.
• Biotype 3 is characterised by an inability to feel pleasure as well as slowed movements and speech.
• Biotype 4 is characterised mostly by anxiety with insomnia along with the inability to feel pleasure.

They are called ‘biotypes’ because of the biological means (brain scans) used to identify them.
Previously, symptoms have been used to identify different types of depression.