Signal Analyses of Oscillatory Brain Activities Pertaining to Mood
Depression is a common illness with an outsized impact on personal life, economics, and society in general. Disrupted signaling in the brain affects rhythms from millisecond neural firing to hourly and even yearly cycles. Chronobiologic oscillatory changes are seen in vocal outputs, heart rate variability, respiratory control, cortisol levels, EEG findings, spinal fluid concentrations of neurotransmitters, neuropeptides, and sodium itself, and many other physiologic measures from imaging and other approaches.
It may be surprising to see how strongly frequency space is related to so many measures in psychiatry! After the rapid tour of experimental chronobiologic evidence, implications for the diagnosis and treatment of depression will be entertained. The hope is to inspire greater attention to multiple frequency domains in neurobiological research towards improved detection and management of all mental illnesses.
Biosketch
Dr Salomon completed his undergraduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976 with a strong interest in mathematics and physics, while completing undergraduate thesis research on the neuroimmunology of multiple sclerosis. After medical school in Belgium his psychiatric research career grew into an amalgam of his many interests. He conducted and contributed to numerous investigations of neurobiologic signal sources, while applying a wide range of analytic methods for non-linear features altered in depression. Most of his over one hundred articles and meeting abstracts and invited presentations involve voice analysis, time-series neurochemistry, or metabolic brain imaging. Dr Salomon was a dedicated academician, and now continues to practice as a psychiatric clinician. His 2023 talk emphasizes the immense power of oscillatory signals and their changes in psychiatric illnesses, especially depression. These approaches present exciting opportunities for improved diagnosis, treatment, and disease prevention.