Nuclear medicine in psychiatry

In the same way that the symptoms between different diseases in psychiatry overlap, functional brain research frequently shows the same pattern of changes across diagnostic borders; on the other hand, many the other tests, e.g. psychological tests, present the same problem as mentioned above; therefore: The psychiatrist seldom applies to an NM specialist to obtain a diagnosis; instead, a nuclear medicine report will rather confirm, or less frequently exclude, the psychiatrist's diagnosis. Ideally, psychiatric patients should be rescanned after the treatment, and changes in perfusion and/or metabolism discussed between psychiatrist and NM specialist. As shown above, there are few practical applications of nuclear medicine due to low specificity and low spatial resolution, although in the aspect of functional imaging it is still superior to CT/MRI, even in their functional modalities. On the other hand, its investigational potential is still growing, as there is no imaging technique in sight which could replace metabolic and receptor studies, and also because the scope of functional imaging in psychiatric diseases is spreading from its traditional applications, like dementia or depression, towards many poorly investigated fields e.g. hypnosis, suicidal behaviour or sleep disorders. (author)