Researchers have discovered a common pattern of gray matter loss in a spectrum of psychiatric disorders, ranging from schizophrenia to depression to addiction, according to a new meta-analysis of brain-imaging studies by Stanford University School of Medicine. “The idea that these disorders share some common brain architecture and that some functions could be abnormal across so many of them is intriguing,” said Thomas Insel, M.D., director of the National Institute of Mental Health. Previously, brain imaging studies tended to focus on one psychiatric disorder in isolation, whereas the Stanford researchers “have stepped back from the trees to look at the forest and see a pattern in that forest that wasn’t apparent
