Groundbreaking brain research could pave the way for new non-drug treatments

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Breathing techniques and music could eventually be deployed to treat mental health disorders such as anxiety and depression, thanks to groundbreaking brain research led by an Ottawa scientist.

In the coming weeks and months, researchers will begin clinical trials aimed at treating anxiety in patients using breathing techniques and treating clinical depression with music, similar to the way physiotherapy is often a first line of treatment for physical injuries and ailments.

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Those experimental therapies, individually tailored for patients based, in part, on their brain’s neuronal activity, represent the culmination of research led by Dr. Georg Northoff, Canada Research Chair at the University of Ottawa’s Brain and Mind Research Institute, and a clinical psychiatrist treating patients at the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre.

That research is the first to uncover a connection between the physical brain and the mind, and it has paved the way for possible therapies to treat common and debilitating mental health disorders, such as depression, anxiety and mania.

Clinical trials set to begin within weeks will aim to measure the impact of individually designed breathing therapies on patients with anxiety. A second clinical trial set to begin early next year will measure the impact of music, individually tailored based on a patient’s neural activity, in treating depression.

Northoff’s team has demonstrated that the brain’s time and space patterns — including the speed and rhythm of neural activity — resurface in the space/time patterns of peoples’ mental states. Researchers borrow from physics and engineering to measure the patterns and show how neural activity connects to mental features such as consciousness and self.

Northoff calls it the missing “common currency” between the brain and the mind.

For example, when people experience depression, they lose energy and feel nothing is moving or changing, mirroring their dramatically slower brain activity.

Northoff said that, when clinically depressed patients are asked how they feel, they often say it is as if time is standing still and nothing is moving.

He said one patient described being unable to speak and feeling that her mother was speaking so quickly that she could not follow the words.

Music therapy to treat patients with depression would be based on trying to speed up their abnormally slow neuronal activity, he said. Using music and rhythm at a speed that was not so fast that they could not process it, but slightly faster than their neuronal activity, would aim to speed up that neuronal activity slowly and improve the symptoms of depression in the patient.

Therapies could also help patients experiencing mania whose brains show abnormally high levels of neuronal activity.

In anxiety, patients experience an uncertainty about what will happen next. In the brain of patients experiencing anxiety, scientists see sudden changes in brain activity levels, which are unpredictable, reflecting the sense of uncertainty patients feel.

Breathing techniques would be aimed at stabilizing and regulating those sudden, unpredictable changes in brain activity, Northoff said.

Breathing techniques have been long used around the world and are a mainstay of practices such as yoga.

Northoff, who recently travelled to India, said many people he spoke to there about his research said it made perfect sense.

There has been no shortage of therapies using breathing and music, for example, but they are not scientifically based, he noted. Northoff said individually designing the treatment based on the patient’s own neuronal activity should make it more effective.

He is hoping the smaller clinical trials show the effectiveness of the therapies and lead to larger trials.

“This could really pave the way for the scientifically based use of non-pharmaceutical therapies.”