The following is excerpted from an online article posted by HealthDay
Playing a quick apple-picking video game can help doctors quickly identify patients with depression, a new study says.
The game can reliably detect depression in as little as three minutes, researchers reported May 18 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
People who quit the game earlier than others were more likely to have anhedonia, a feature of major depressive disorder (MDD) that leads individuals to lose the ability to enjoy normally pleasurable things, researchers said.
Folks previously diagnosed with depression by standard tests stopped enjoying the game’s activities 50% sooner than those without depression, the study found.
“Our behavioral game gives us clues to what is happening in the brains of patients with depression, which we hope will let us identify them as reliably as finding heart disease by taking someone’s blood pressure,” co-senior researcher Paul Glimcher said in a news release.
Source: HealthDay
https://www.healthday.com/health-news/mental-health/video-game-can-detect-depression-in-minutes-study-says