Depressed Adolescents Have Altered Brain Structure
Ayinde:
THURSDAY, Jan. 29 (HealthDayNews) -- The area of the brain called the hippocampus is smaller in adolescents with major depression compared to their healthy peers, researchers report.
Major depressive disorder is a severe, common and debilitating illness with alarming rates of medical problems and death. And there is evidence that child and adolescent depression leads to adult depression, says a report in the Jan. 29 issue of BMC Medicine.
"We are finding biological factors that seem to be involved with major depression," says study author Frank MacMaster, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of anatomy and neurobiology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. "A lot of people have stigmatized depression, but it is a real medical condition."
The hippocampus is associated with motivation, emotional control and memory, and plays a role in controlling the body's response to stress, MacMaster says.
Results of studies that measured the size of the hippocampus in adults with depression have disagreed about whether there is a difference in hippocampal size between healthy and depressed adults.
In this first study to measure hippocampal size in teens, researchers studied 34 adolescents aged 13 to 18. Seventeen of the patients had major depressive disorder, while the others didn't.
All the teens had a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan, and the researchers measured the volume of their left and right hippocampus.
The investigators found the hippocampus of teens with major depressive disorder was, on average, 17 percent smaller than the non-depressed teens. This size difference was particularly prominent in the left hippocampus, they report.
"I was surprised by the amount of difference in hippocampal size, which is on the high side of the hippocampal size difference seen between depressed and healthy adults," MacMaster says.
MacMaster believes these results indicate there is a genetic component to major depression, which probably involves several genes. "But we have not found the smoking gun gene yet," he says.
With drugs and other interventions, the prognosis of depression in teens is hopeful, MacMaster says. "Becoming aware of a child's depression is the real front line from a clinical point of view," he adds.
The goal of this research is to identify biomarkers that will aid doctors in diagnosing adolescent depression, he says.
MacMaster stresses that depression in adolescents "is a biological, medical condition. It's not a character flaw arising from poor parenting."
Dr. Joseph L. Price, a professor of anatomy and neurobiology at Washington University in St. Louis, says other studies have found differences in hippocampal volume in older patients with major depression.
And some studies have found that women with major depression had a smaller corpus callosum, which connects the left and right halves of the brain. The same thing was found in the children of these women, indicating that they, too, have an increased risk for depression, Price says.
Price adds that, in his own work, he has found changes in some types of brain cells in people with major depression compared to healthy patients.
Taken together, all these studies "indicate that there are several physical changes in the brain that underlie major depression," Price says. "All this might not help us treat the disease, but it will help us understand it."
Dr. Hillary Blumberg, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale University, adds this study is important because it may lead to identifying a biological marker that can diagnose depression in teens.
"This is a very hopeful message, because it suggests that we are developing a better sense of where to look in the brain to understand the development of depression." And this may lead to better treatment, she says.
http://www.ajc.com/health/content/shared-auto/healthnews/depr/517182.html
Rootsie:
The question I have is whether it is events in the childrens' lives that depress the growth of the hippocampus. I am working now with a bunch of depressed teens. If you look at their histories this makes perfect sense. One girl took an overdose of her anti-anxiety meds yesterday in a half-hearted suicide attempt. She is diagnosed as 'a borderline personality.' The sort of things she says to me are "I'm not going to live very long" and "it's genetic." I have to reply that it is hard for an intelligent person to look around the world today and NOT feel depressed. What I see in all the children I work with is that they are subject to a 'therapeutic model' which tells them that their pain is a result of some defect unique to them. We live in a world that is soul-sick. To imagine that this has no effect on us, particularly on the most vulnerable among us, is to lose the forest for the trees.
out_of_Zion:
When I was 19 I was diagnosed as bipolar after staying awake for seven full days straight. Since that point in my life, any deviance in taking my medicine results in irregular sleep, or complete lack of sleep...I've been in the psych ward of the hospital 2x and it is a very humbling experience. I go hypomanic and feel as though I am superhuman practically, but those I see around me are often walking zombies. I could go on and on abou those two experiences, but I will just leave it at that they felt surreal. No sane person ever expects to end up in a place like that, and even when you're there - it's like I was caught questioning if the experience was even real, if you catch my drift.
I agree completely that it's tough not to be depressed with the state of the world, but there is a very real biochemical aspect to it all, which in my case, the doctors do not even fully understand. They know that serotonin is improperly regulated and there are "water pockets" within the bi-polar brain, but all the research I read dealt with EFFECTS and then prevention, while failing to explain the physical and biochemical causes...they have a ways to go before an full explanation emerges on that front.
I'm thankful that they have medicine these days for this, though, because with the degree I have the illness I would not be able to function and live a normal life without the medicine. I'd never sleep and I'd die very young...due to lack of rest for my internal organs.
It's tough to deal with reality sometimes.
Kebo:
After reading some of the thoughts of Krishnamurti I get his view that the ills and problems and the world originate in the individual psyche. Presently we don't know enough about the brain to get it under control. So our psyches are out of our control and the world is out of our control.
I feel that we are in a stage in evolution where intelligence is forming but hasn't matured, and until we have understood the workings of the brain/mind/psyche and have them under control there will continue to be unrest.
Kebo
out_of_Zion:
I don't think our brain structure has changed at all within the last 6,000 - 10,000 years, namely, all recorded human history.
What you see in terms of dysfuctionality is the cause of having such complex brains that require such differentiation between lobes. Inadequacies in any given portion (but especially the limbic system and frontal cortex) can impair an individuals' ability to function. The brain is a very highly tuned machine, more complex than any computer man has made...
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