A new center at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston will conduct research into mood disorders, and provide care to patients with those disorders, which include bipolar disorder and depression.
“All of us, if we don’t have a family member with a mood disorder, we have a friend or co-worker who suffers from one,” said Jair Soares, M.D., co-director of the new Center of Excellence on Mood Disorders. “New research is showing that a mood disorder has nothing to do with will. These conditions are brain diseases,” said Soares, who also is executive director of the UT Harris County Psychiatric Center and chief of psychiatry at LBJ General Hospital and Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 9.5 percent of the U.S. population age 18 years and older has a mood disorder in a given year.
“Mood disorders ruin lives, break up families, and shorten lives through suicide and medical illnesses,” said Alan Swann, M.D., professor and co-director of the center. “Every phase of life is affected by mood disorders.”
Swann said at the center, patients will be evaluated and treated and research will be conducted in a single place.
“We’ll be able to educate our students and residents, our patients and their families, and the general public,” he said.
Giovana Zunta-Soares, M.D., assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the medical school, said researchers including those at UT-Houston, are beginning to learn more about the relationship between changes in the brain and mood disorders.
“We know bipolar patients have subtle abnormalities in key brain regions involved in modulation of emotions, but we don’t know why,” Zunta-Soares said. “We’d like to eventually have a way to diagnose the disease physiologically just as we do in other diseases such as high blood pressure, for example.”
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By DEBORAH MANN LAKE
The University of Texas
Health Science Center at Houston
deborah.m.lake@uth.tmc.edu