Good news! Could this be a breakthrough?
"Although depression comes and goes, people who are prone to it retain distinct brain-wiring networks throughout their lives. An analysis of more than 180 functional magnetic resonance images showed that compared with healthy controls, people with major depression have larger ‘salience networks’ that integrate sensory information and emotion. These networks become more active during a depressive episode but persist even after the depression lifts. Researchers found the large networks in children as young as nine years old who had not yet been depressed but who went on to develop the disease as teenagers, suggesting this trait causes depression rather than being a result of it."
"The symptoms of depression might come and go, but new evidence suggests that the pattern of brain wiring behind it remains the same for life. The largest imaging study of its kind has found that a certain brain network involved in directing attention to stimuli is nearly twice as big in people with depression as it is in the rest of the population — and that it remains that way when a person no longer feels depressed. ...
To test this, the team turned to the ABCD Study, which aims to track brain development in nearly 12,000 children between the ages of 9 and young adulthood. They identified 57 children who did not have depression before the age of 13 but who developed the disorder as adolescents. At ages at young as nine years, these children already had expanded salience networks compared with their peers. ..."
From the abstract:
"Decades of neuroimaging studies have shown modest differences in brain structure and connectivity in depression, hindering mechanistic insights or the identification of risk factors for disease onset. Furthermore, whereas depression is episodic, few longitudinal neuroimaging studies exist, limiting understanding of mechanisms that drive mood-state transitions. The emerging field of precision functional mapping has used densely sampled longitudinal neuroimaging data to show behaviourally meaningful differences in brain network topography and connectivity between and in healthy individuals, but this approach has not been applied in depression. Here, using precision functional mapping and several samples of deeply sampled individuals, we found that the frontostriatal salience network is expanded nearly twofold in the cortex of most individuals with depression. This effect was replicable in several samples and caused primarily by network border shifts, with three distinct modes of encroachment occurring in different individuals. Salience network expansion was stable over time, unaffected by mood state and detectable in children before the onset of depression later in adolescence. Longitudinal analyses of individuals scanned up to 62 times over 1.5 years identified connectivity changes in frontostriatal circuits that tracked fluctuations in specific symptoms and predicted future anhedonia symptoms. Together, these findings identify a trait-like brain network topology that may confer risk for depression and mood-state-dependent connectivity changes in frontostriatal circuits that predict the emergence and remission of depressive symptoms over time."
Found: a brain-wiring pattern linked to depression "The disease has a consistent mark in the brain even when symptoms are absent."
The human brain contains distinct networks of different sizes, but the salience network – shown here in black – is consistently larger in people with major depressive disorder (two right columns).
Fig. 1: Frontostriatal salience network is expanded nearly twofold in the cortex of highly sampled individuals with depression.
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