The expert considers that the treatments have not evolved “what is desirable” and there are no precision therapies.
The president of the Weizmann Institute of Sciences in Israel, the neuroscientist Alon Chen, laments that even though stress “is more prevalent in women than in men”, treatments have not evolved “what is desirable” and there are no therapies of precision.
The stress expert, who has participated in a conference at the Ramón Areces Foundation on “Mysteries of the human mind: the future of the brain and neural sciences”, stresses that it is essential to continue researching to be able to offer a solution to mental ailments and pathologies more suitable for each patient.
“In these last two years of the pandemic we have realized how important mental health is, even more so after reviewing the latest suicide data and how it has affected all layers of the population, causing post-traumatic syndromes,” warns Chen.
Therefore, the study of the brain, in his opinion, is not only the responsibility of biologists and doctors but of mathematicians, physicists, psychologists, to attend to both environmental factors and genetic aspects.
Why do we treat everyone the same in such a complex disease? This is the question asked by the also director of the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich (Germany), in the absence of a clear diagnosis.
In his research work, Alon Chen, along with the 40 different teams he leads, focuses on the biological processes by which stress and anxiety develop in our bodies, as well as the mechanisms in the brain that are activated by these mind States.
If the delivery finally takes place in a city like Madrid, it turns out that “in those nine months the baby has been designed to be attentive”, alert to any danger; which can generate an attention deficit from the beginning, “it has not been designed to sit for eight hours.”
Other factors such as poverty can generate signals that will be transmitted in development to the baby’s brain and body and, in the future, even if he eats like the other children in his class, his body will accumulate more nutrients and may develop disorders food, obesity, diabetes, etc.
In this way, Chen considers it urgent not to stop the study of the brain until it is possible to discover “why a 7-year-old child has suicidal tendencies.”
In this field, the professor and his collaborators have discovered genes, proteins, and neural circuits that play a crucial role in these phenomena.
They have also found epigenetic mechanisms and information processing circuits in the brain that are linked to anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and metabolic syndromes.