United States – A new research shows that specific brain structure predisposes some individuals to depression, as reported by HealthDay.
Key Discovery in Depression Research
New ‘deeper’ fMRI brain scans showed that a part of the brain, known as the salience network, is almost twice as large in people with depression as in those without such a disorder, scientists found on September 4 in the journal Nature.
The salience network is another network of brain regions that integrates reward and attention, according to the researchers.
The Salience Network and Depression
“The idea that having a larger salience network enhances the risk of depression—the effect is an order of magnitude greater than what is generally found in fMRI research,” noted Dr. Conor Liston of Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, the senior author of the study.
fMRI is based on detecting the change in blood flow in the brain and, therefore, is used to detect patterns of activity in the brain.
In total, six individuals with major depression were treated as patients, and 37 control subjects were enrolled in the study.
Study Details and Findings
The average salience network was significantly larger in the depression patients, with the present study revealing the depression patients’ salience networks occupied 73% more brain surface than the control patients.
‘The role of this salience network being implicated in depression kind of makes sense because one of the main deficits in depression is something called anhedonia, which is the inability to feel pleasure and enjoy everyday activities,’ said Dr. Charles Lynch, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medicine.
The researchers then tried to replicate what they saw with data from hundreds of other brain scans from a different group of patients to confirm those observations in only a few depressed people.
Replication and Broader Implications
It was revealed that the salience network was significantly 70% more prominent in 299 patients diagnosed with depression as compared to 932 healthy subjects.
The results indicate that the children with a larger central executive network have a higher susceptibility to depression in later years – similar to having a built-in blueprint for the disease, the researchers explained, as reported by HealthDay.
Future Directions in Treatment and Research
“For years, many investigators assumed that brain networks look the same in everybody,” Lynch said. “But the findings in this work build on a growing body of research indicating that there are fundamental differences between individuals.”
The next objective of the team is to assess how various treatments for depression change the function of brain networks – how drugs and other therapies reduce the severity of depressive symptoms.