There was an article in The Economist a few weeks ago, regarding a study performed by a University of Tokyo Professor in which he compared the activity and movements of healthy individuals against those of the clinically depressed. The study concluded that clinically depressed people move in patterns which are different enough to be statistically measurable and may indeed become diagnostic of clinical depression.
This study intrigued me, because it seemed to offer a lot of hope for people like me who have been accused of being depressed as opposed to being in actual pain. Now, Caroline recently wrote an excellent piece in her blog about the benefits of certain anti-depressants for pain treatment, which I had not considered. However, If you are a doctror, I would rather you call things as they are, and if one is prescribing anti-Ds for pain, then call it as such and don't try to tell a person they are depressed because you are out of ideas.
But then I got to thinking about that article, and read some other opinions about it. I found out that a lot of statistician and other geeky types didn't like the methodologies used in the first place. But nobody seemed to point out the big glaring omission in the report. It totally fails to take into account people with chronic pain or illness. I can guarantee you that a person with moderate or severe (say) Rheumatoid Arthritis is not going to be gamboling about like a lamb in springtime, no matter how happy they might be on the inside.
Can the movements of the chronically ill be shown to follow yet another pattern to those of the well are the clinically depressed? What if someone is both ill and depressed? And also, what about measuring the efficacy of anti-depressants? Have they tried measuring the movements of a depressed person who is being treated? because to me, that might be a real applicable use for this study -
...if they can iron out that whole "ill and in pain" wrinkle.
Links and references:
The Economist article: http://economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9861412
Dr Yamamoto's site. http://www.p.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~yamamoto/yycve/yycve.html
You want the paper entitled Universal Scaling Law in Human Behavioral Organization,
An analysis of Dr. Yamamoto's study, which I found interesting: http://chance.dartmouth.edu/chancewiki/index.php/Chance_News_30#Depressed_people_follow_a_different_power_law_distribution
Interesting discussion on a Comlumbia University site about Dr. Yamamoto's article: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/10/something_cool.html
Carolines excellent piece about anti-D's for pain: http://chiariandsyringomyeliaincanada.blogspot.com/2007/11/anti-depressants-for-chronic-pain.html
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