United States: A new study shows that some people might be more likely to get depression because of a special pattern in their brains. Researchers found that a part of the brain called the salience network is almost twice as big in people with depression compared to those without it.
They discovered this by using “deep” MRI brain scans, and they shared their findings in the journal Nature on September 4.
Salience Network and Depression
As reported by the HealthDay, the salience network is group of brain regions thought to be very much involved in the reward processing and also focusing on the attention said the researchers.
Also having a larger salience network which appears to increase the risk of depression and the effect is an order to magnitude larger than what we usually see in the fMRI studies and also said some of the researchers and Dr. Conor Liston is one of them who is professor of Psychiatry and the neurosciences at Weill Cornell Medicine in the New York.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans depict activity patterns in the brain based on the changes of the level of blood flow.
Study Details and Implications
Six patients with major depression were asked to submit repeated scans using functional magnetic resonance imaging brain and the results were compared with that of 37 normal subjects.
In particular, on average the patients with depression had their salience networks which occupied in average 73% more of the brain’s surface of the cortex compared to the healthy controls.
The salience network being implicated in depression kind of makes sense since one of the key features missing in depression is anhedonia, which is the inability to experience pleasure and to enjoy even mundane daily activities.”
Future Research
The research team then compared the scans from the current group of depression patients to scans of hundreds of other patients, to ensure that what they were seeing was common in depression.
It has been identified that the salience network is more than 70% greater in 299 patients with the condition as compared to 932 normal subjects. The result of their study indicates that individuals who had larger salience network in childhood are even more prone to develop depression at some point in their lifetime reality as if they are born predisposed to the disease, as researchers pointed out.
“Scientists long ago were essentially thinking that different brain networks have the same pattern in everybody,” Lynch pointed out. “However, the findings in this work is based on accumulating empirical evidence arguing that there are categorical differences in people.
After that, the team aims at understanding how depressive treatments impact the functioning of these networks in an effort to determine how drugs and other interventions help to reduce depressive symptoms.
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