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Brain Scan Predicts the Success of Social Anxiety Disorder Treatment

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: August 12th, 2015, 7:00pm UTC

jan_jes writes: MIT researchers performed brain scans on 38 SAD patients and were able to predict with about 80% accuracy which patients would do well in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Use of the scans to predict treatment outcomes improved predictions fivefold over use of a clinician's assessment alone. The researchers used a form of brain imaging that scans patients in a state of rest. Resting-state images can be done quickly and reliably, so they have the potential to be used in a clinical setting. ldquo;Choice of therapy is like a wheel of chance,rdquo; says first author Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli, a research scientist in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. ldquo;Wersquo;re hoping to use brain imaging to help provide more reliable predictors of treatment response.rdquo;pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Brain+Scan+Predicts+the+Success+of+Social+Anxiety+Disorder+Treatment%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1TuDcBh"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F15%2F08%2F12%2F1941242%2Fbrain-scan-predicts-the-success-of-social-anxiety-disorder-treatment%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/08/12/1941242/brain-scan-predicts-the-success-of-social-anxiety-disorder-treatment?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/08/12/1941242/brain-scan-predicts-the-success-of-social-anxiety-disorder-treatment?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/PmA8PZRXTgI" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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