Bridging the Mental Health and Inflammation Gap
The relationship between brain inflammation and mental health is often misunderstood and misdiagnosed. Not enough long-term, real-world research has been carried out to track mental health symptoms in patients with brain inflammation, whether caused by autoimmune disease, infection, or injury.
While there is a growing body of evidence of the connections, research often leaves out the vital insights and experiences of those most affected – the patients and their families.
As a result, accurate diagnosis and effective treatment remain elusive and patients feel unheard.
We feel it’s time for a new patient-centered approach. To understand brain inflammation and mental health, researchers need three things:
- Statistics
- Samples
- Stories
Quantitative data point to scale and prevalence, but don’t map the connections between different conditions and symptoms. Blood testing and other bio-samples describe the biological landscape, but can’t capture the reality of the patient’s daily life. Patient insights are the missing link. By combining all three, researchers can listen to patients – literally and biochemically – and begin to see the patterns that have eluded the clinical community for so long.
The Unhide™ Project
Unhide™ project hopes to explore how patient-powered research, wearable technology, and artificial intelligence can help overcome current research challenges, by collating and analyzing different types of patient data on a much larger scale.
It makes the case for a collaborative approach to bring together patients, researchers, and clinicians to advance understanding of inflammation and mental health.
Without patient insights, research on neuroinflammation and autoimmune disease fails to spot the connections between seemingly unrelated diseases and their impact on mental health. Advances in patient-centered research and digital technology offer a new lens through which to see the bigger picture – and revolutionize diagnosis and treatment.
Join us as we envision a world where the impact of inflammation on mental health is widely understood, and promptly diagnosed and treated.
