BRAIN FINGERPRINTING

A group of researchers say they’ve found a way to screen teenagers’ brains for mental health issues… before the issues manifest

WORDS: GINNY SMITH

Mental health conditions are not only common, they’re increasing, with one report estimating that 1 in 6 children had a probable mental health condition in 2021. The NHS spends £15.5 billion every year on treatment and still thousands of people who could benefit from help are unable to access it. But what if there was a way to detect people who were at risk of developing a mental health condition, and intervene, before they even began experiencing symptoms? That’s exactly what a new paper, published in the journal NeuroImage, claims to have done.

The researchers used a database of brain scans of teenagers from the Sunshine Coast, on the eastern edge of Australia. The first scans were taken when the teenagers were 12 and taken again every four months for the next five years. The researchers were able to use the scans to predict which participants would go on to score highly in a survey about ‘mental distress’, which measured anxiety and depression symptoms. This is particularly important because 50 per cent of mental health conditions start before the age of 14, and 75 per cent by the age of 25. And intervening early can often be the difference between someone having a single episode or living with a life-long condition.

“I think the brain is one of the most complex things on Earth and there are a lot of things we still don’t know about it,” Associate Professor Zach Shan, head of Neuroimaging Platform at the University of the Sunshine Coast’s Thompson Institute, and lead author in this new study, told me. “More and more people believe mental health problems originate during adolescence, so our team wanted to see if we could use brain imaging to monitor or pin down when it starts.”