United States: Researchers have found novel insights into how and why some people face depression after discovering that one specific network in the brain is significantly larger in individuals with the condition.
More about the finding
The outer covering of the brain is said to be a communication junction box where various parts of the brain converse with each other to perform certain operations.
Investigators now suggest that a greater portion of the human brain in depressives is activated in a circuit that deals with the attention to rewards and threats compared to nondepressives.
More about the study
According to Dr Charles Lynch, a co-author of the research from Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, “It’s taking up more real estate on the brain surface than we see is typical in healthy controls,” the Guardian reported.
He also said that expansion here meant the size of others, which generally often neighboring – brain networks were smaller.
In the journal Nature, Lynch and colleagues explain how they employed a novel technique called precision functional mapping in which several fMRI (functional MRI) scans of each participant are analyzed at once.
This technique was used by the team on 141 participants with depression and on 37 participants with no depression so that the size of each participant’s brain networks could be determined. From there, they determined the mean size for each group.
They discovered that the frontostriatal salience network, which is a part of the brain, was enlarged by 73 percent on average in participants with depression in comparison with healthy persons.
These results were backed up when the researchers also used single brain scans previously done and collected from 932 healthy individual scans of 299 people with depression.
The team found out that this brain network size in the depressed subjects did not alter with time, mood, or the transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS treatment.
However, connections between the parts of the network changed their temporal synchronization depending on the presence of certain symptoms of depression, and these changes predicted the severity of future symptoms, the Guardian reported.
The team also noted further that through a study with data from pre-adolescent children who were followed up and brain scans on 57 children who later developed adolescent depression, this brain network was larger years in advance of their developing depression and was abnormally large in adults with late-onset depression too.
The scientists said that the results could provide an answer to find out whether certain individuals could be at rising risk of developing depression and could help develop personalized treatments.