Mental illness can also be called a mental health disorder that can affect the mood, your way of thinking, and the way you behave. Some of the examples of mental illness are depression, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and many more.
Brain Growth Charts Can Predict Mental Illness
Brain growth charts are essential equipment to understand mental illness. Researchers have developed their own chart for the brain to check for the development of the brain and also the aging of the brain.
You all must be knowing about the growth chart. A growth chart is a representation of your child’s height, weight, and also head size and compares it with the different children of the same age in a graphical manner. It also helps in predicting earlier if any kind of problem is there with the child’s health or if he is fit and healthy. This growth chart helps in understanding whether the child is healthy or not.
From the idea of this growth chart researchers also thought to make a growth chart regarding the brain and its functions. This growth chart helps in looking or checking for how the brain is functioning, about the development of the brain, and also about the aging of the brain.
Aging can increase the risk of mental illness. So, to cure or to take preventions from all those mental illness researchers made this growth chart of the brain to compare it from the same age people and understand about the development of any kind of illness of the brain.
Radboudumc (Research of the Radboud University Medical Center) is a university medical center that specializes in caring for patients, doing some sort of research on health-related topics, and also education. So, the researchers of Radboudumc have developed a set of growth charts for the brain. They have made this chart for the life span of 2 to 100. This helps to understand different people’s brain conditions as it gives them an example or reference to map variation. Some of the brain-based conditions are ADHD, schizophrenia, dementia, and Alzheimer like mental illness.
This growth chart has its own different kinds of uses like they can be used for detecting alterations or any kind of changes in the brain that can affect the brain or can suddenly bring any kind of mental disorders so that it can be prevented at an early stage. It also helps in the division or classification of mental disorders in different ports.
For measuring the thickness of brain structures, there is an established software pipeline called Freesurfer which can be used. Earlier these kinds of charts were not available so it was a big problem for people as any kind of mental illness can’t be detected and cured beforehand. But now there are so many devices available to the community that can detect all of their mental illness earlier only and can be treated at an early stage.
For clinical studies and research, the software could be more useful and can be of great help. That software pipeline named free surfer is used by thousands of hospitals across the world so that it can be helpful for the researchers and doctors for studying and understand their patients or a person’s brain and can be compared to the person of the same age to understand the difference in the brain and also to find the problem in the brain so that it can be treated at an early stage. This is how the growth chart of the brain can help in understanding mental illness and alert us earlier about that illness so that it can be treated and prevented at its primary stage only.
