Part of Brain Network Much Bigger In People With Depression, Scientists Find 47
Researchers have discovered that people with depression have an expanded brain network, specifically the frontostriatal salience network, which is 73% larger compared to healthy individuals. "It's taking up more real estate on the brain surface than we see is typical in healthy controls," said Dr Charles Lynch, a co-author of the research, from Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. He added that expansion meant the size of other -- often neighboring -- brain networks were smaller. The Guardian reports: Writing in the journal Nature, Lynch and colleagues report how they used precision functional mapping, a new approach to brain imaging that analyses a host of fMRI (functional MRI) scans from each individual. The team applied this method to 141 people with depression and 37 people without it, enabling them to measure accurately the size of each participant's brain networks. They then took the average size for each group. They found that a part of the brain called the frontostriatal salience network was expanded by 73% on average in participants with depression compared with healthy controls.
These findings were supported by an analysis of single brain scans previously collected from 932 healthy people and 299 with depression. The team said the size of this brain network in people with depression did not change with time, mood or transcranial magnetic stimulation treatment. However, brain signals between different parts of the network became less synchronised when participants had certain symptoms of depression, with these changes also associated with the severity of future symptoms. The team added that an analysis of brain scans from 57 children who went on to develop depression as adolescents revealed this brain network was expanded years before their symptoms developed, while it was also expanded in adults with late onset depression.
The researchers said this suggested an expanded brain network could be a risk factor for developing depression, rather than a consequence of the condition. However, they said it was unclear to what extent this enlarged network was the result of genetics or experiences, and whether the association with depression arose from this expansion or from other brain networks consequently being smaller. The team added that their results could offer a way to explore whether certain people may be at increased risk of developing depression, and could help develop personalised treatments.
These findings were supported by an analysis of single brain scans previously collected from 932 healthy people and 299 with depression. The team said the size of this brain network in people with depression did not change with time, mood or transcranial magnetic stimulation treatment. However, brain signals between different parts of the network became less synchronised when participants had certain symptoms of depression, with these changes also associated with the severity of future symptoms. The team added that an analysis of brain scans from 57 children who went on to develop depression as adolescents revealed this brain network was expanded years before their symptoms developed, while it was also expanded in adults with late onset depression.
The researchers said this suggested an expanded brain network could be a risk factor for developing depression, rather than a consequence of the condition. However, they said it was unclear to what extent this enlarged network was the result of genetics or experiences, and whether the association with depression arose from this expansion or from other brain networks consequently being smaller. The team added that their results could offer a way to explore whether certain people may be at increased risk of developing depression, and could help develop personalised treatments.
Inquisitive minds want to know... (Score:1, Funny)
Re: Inquisitive minds want to know... (Score:1, Troll)
I came here to say something related and am gratified the first comment is about ultramodernismâ(TM)s exploitive tendency.
My thought is what a shame the western world continues to view mental health as a primarily individual phenomenon. Individuals may experience individual symptoms, but I believe the cause, and the cure if we can ever find one, lie at the community level.
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Why were we downmodded? Has /. been overtaken by the management class?
Seriously, like, it's normal to feel depressed if you are living in a shitty environment. I heard a psychiatrist, a very enlightened one, say something like, "Before we make a maladaptive diagnosis, we first need to make sure the patient isn't surrounded by assholes."
If community is broken, individuals will be depressed. This means their brains are working normally. Attempting to fix the individuals in this scenario is always doomed to fa
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This tracks with the findings I had from a recent ADHD evaluation. The doctor noticed that I was left handed but then further realized I was actually ambidextrous. I am dominant with different hands with different tasks. This is often seen as a sign that my brain functions are spread across my frontal cortex.....kind of a distributed network. But in most people, these functions are isolated in one hemisphere and they are more specialized at those tasks that are right/left brain. Where as for me, I am m
In layman's terms (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:In layman's terms (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you're confusing cynicism with depression. People can actually still suffer from depression even when they're living what otherwise should be a fulfilling life. [reddit.com] Conversely, one can also acknowledge that human society is a total crock of shit while still being rather upbeat about the whole situation, e.g. the late comedian George Carlin.
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You don't actually know whether George Carlin suffered from depression or not. Likewise, Robin Williams appeared to be the most upbeat guy possible, but I'm pretty sure that demons haunted his every thought.
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A LOT (most?) good comedian had a horrible childhood. I think there's something about life throwing everything at you to depress you, and battling that with humor, which is a sort of "forge" for the comedic sword.
Drew Carey was raped and tried to kill himself.
Jim Carey's family was basically homeless (his dad was a janitor and they lived in the janitorial shack).
Tim Allen's dad was killed when he was young, he had to move to a new/terrible (for him at least) place, which led to him dealing coke.
I could go
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A LOT (most?) good comedian had a horrible childhood. I think there's something about life throwing everything at you to depress you, and battling that with humor, which is a sort of "forge" for the comedic sword.
That reminds me of the joke about how anti-depressants destroyed Jewish comedy.
Though I'm not sure that's quite true. I think there a bad childhood helps create a comedian, either through coping as you mentioned or learning humour as a defence mechanism (joking to defuse the situation).
But there's also temperament, a lot of comedy is learning to lower your social status so that the audience doesn't find you threatening and is willing to let their guard down. Starting out depressed can help a comedian find t
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Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: In layman's terms (Score:2)
I think it comes from more from trying to live the life that society tells us to (you need this car to be happy! you need more people to read your social media posts! you need a big home! you need to make more money to afford those other things!) You then get sucked into the depression and burnout before you hit the realization that you're chasing after things that won't actually make you happy. See the book "Lost Connections" for more details on this.
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Re:In layman's terms (Score:5, Informative)
A quick google told me that we don't really know what the "frontostriatal salience network" does. just FYI.
Re:In layman's terms (Score:5, Insightful)
A quick google told me that we don't really know what the "frontostriatal salience network" does. just FYI.
I'm glad you pointed this out. Seeing the OP get a +4 insightful mod for perpetuating misinformation about depression is what happens when people don't bother to fact check before they moderate. It's frustrating to see the usual misconception being perpetuated that people who are depressed have just come to a logical conclusion that life sucks in some way. I've known people who've suffered from depression and that misconception couldn't be more wrong.
Depression is a mental illness where people feel depressed even when there's no underlying life issue which should be causing them to feel that way. It's not the way you or I might feel "low" because we had a bad day at work or got into an argument with a loved one, and then we'll feel better later on once we've gotten over it.
Re:In layman's terms (Score:4, Informative)
From the linked article:
Now researchers say that in people with depression, a larger part of the brain is involved in the network that controls attention to rewards and threats than in those without depression.
Also, as I understood the article, it's not saying that the volume or the surface area of the brain of depression sufferers is larger, which is how some people here seem to be reading it. Rather, the surface is divided between different networks of neurons responsible for different stuff. In people with depression, this network takes more area, at the expense of other networks, article doesn't specify which ones.
The surface of the brain is a communication junction box at which different areas talk to each other to carry out particular processes. But there is a finite amount of space for these networks to share. ...
“It’s taking up more real estate on the brain surface than we see is typical in healthy controls,” said Dr Charles Lynch, a co-author of the research, from Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. He added that expansion meant the size of other – often neighbouring – brain networks were smaller.
It's surprising that the area they're suggesting is responsible is the area associated with reactions to threats and rewards. My understanding of depression was that it was an overall feeling the everything sucks, rather than heightened reaction to individual events. But maybe the actual damage is caused by shrinking of neighbouring areas, rather than expansion of this area.
Re:In layman's terms (Score:4, Interesting)
> rather than heightened reaction to individual events.
What about requiring a heightened rate of rewards needed to keep going?
I have no idea what I'm talking about, I just know it definitely isn't as simple as "seeing the world as it really is" .
I do know that "depressive realism" is a working hypothesis, but I understand it as more of an effect than a cause of depression.
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From the linked article:
Now researchers say that in people with depression, a larger part of the brain is involved in the network that controls attention to rewards and threats than in those without depression.
Also, as I understood the article, it's not saying that the volume or the surface area of the brain of depression sufferers is larger, which is how some people here seem to be reading it. Rather, the surface is divided between different networks of neurons responsible for different stuff. In people with depression, this network takes more area, at the expense of other networks, article doesn't specify which ones.
The surface of the brain is a communication junction box at which different areas talk to each other to carry out particular processes. But there is a finite amount of space for these networks to share. ...
“It’s taking up more real estate on the brain surface than we see is typical in healthy controls,” said Dr Charles Lynch, a co-author of the research, from Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. He added that expansion meant the size of other – often neighbouring – brain networks were smaller.
It's surprising that the area they're suggesting is responsible is the area associated with reactions to threats and rewards. My understanding of depression was that it was an overall feeling the everything sucks, rather than heightened reaction to individual events. But maybe the actual damage is caused by shrinking of neighbouring areas, rather than expansion of this area.
They talk about it growing with time. I wonder if what they're seeing is depressed people spending more time thinking about threats/rewards as a coping mechanism, and the region of the brain grows as a result.
That could be consistent with the effect being seen in pre-symptomatic individuals. It's a coping mechanism that works to a point, but then takes over.
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Not that my brain is big enough to understand my brain, but we do know something
The salience network (SN) plays a central role in cognitive control by integrating sensory input to guide attention, attend to motivationally salient stimuli and recruit appropriate functional brain-behavior networks to modulate behavior. Mounting evidence suggests that disturbances in SN function underlie abnormalities in cognitive control and may be a common etiology underlying many psychiatric disorders. Such functional and anatomical abnormalities have been recently apparent in studies and meta-analyses of psychiatric illness using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and voxel-based morphometry (VBM). Of particular importance, abnormal structure and function in major cortical nodes of the SN, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and anterior insula (AI), have been observed as a common neurobiological substrate across a broad spectrum of psychiatric disorders. In addition to cortical nodes of the SN, the network’s associated subcortical structures, including the dorsal striatum, mediodorsal thalamus and dopaminergic brainstem nuclei, comprise a discrete regulatory loop circuit. The SN’s cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical loop increasingly appears to be central to mechanisms of cognitive control, as well as to a broad spectrum of psychiatric illnesses and their available treatments. Functional imbalances within the SN loop appear to impair cognitive control, and specifically may impair self-regulation of cognition, behavior and emotion, thereby leading to symptoms of psychiatric illness. Furthermore, treating such psychiatric illnesses using invasive or non-invasive brain stimulation techniques appears to modulate SN cortical-subcortical loop integrity, and these effects may be central to the therapeutic mechanisms of brain stimulation treatments in many psychiatric illnesses. Here, we review clinical and experimental evidence for abnormalities in SN cortico-striatal-thalamic loop circuits in major depression, substance use disorders (SUD), anxiety disorders, schizophrenia and eating disorders (ED). We also review emergent therapeutic evidence that novel invasive and non-invasive brain stimulation treatments may exert therapeutic effects by normalizing abnormalities in the SN loop, thereby restoring the capacity for cognitive control.
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Amen, brother!
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Ignorance really is bliss. :-/
Only until the problem becomes impossible to ignore.
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The quality of your experience of the world is determined by your cognitive filters -- which aspects of experience you instantly regard as salient, pay attention to, and process, and which you habitually disregard. Note the symmetry between the extreme positions that the world is a crock of shit and the world is nothing but good: either way there's nothing to choose from.
I think it's interesting that they've detected an anomaly in the frontostriatal salience network, because making choices is one of the m
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Paranoid people often make the highest quality code, but are not happy about it.
Marvin (Score:5, Funny)
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I bet he'd be good at operating automatic doors.
Brain Network? (Score:1)
Get to the important stuff (Score:1, Offtopic)
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Re: Get to the important stuff (Score:2)
Teump isn't Hitler. But when he dies (of old age presumably), the MAGA cult will find a real Hitler to fill the void. They will carry Trump grievences and perceived slights from beyond the grave.
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Trump wishes to be more like Hitler but he is so much like Mussolini he could be the reincarnation.
I object to the improper use of TDS; especially educated people falling into rationalizing within another's framing. A deranged person is delusional and the cause of a syndrome is often in the name (or it's the name of the discoverer.)
While it's fitting to say Trump makes people delusional, it's not those who hate him strongly (for very a great many sane, reality based reasons) it's his CULT of followers who
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Brain plasticity (Score:2)
People with depression tend to focus on the negative aspects of everything they think of, like someone who has experienced trauma often can't help but think of it over and over.
The human brain is surprisingly plastic - it can adapt physically over time to whatever it is trained to by experience. So teasing out whether depressed people are depressed because they're born with a section of brain that's overdeveloped and causes this kind of thought pattern or if they've literally molded their brains in a way t
Re:Brain plasticity (Score:5, Insightful)
Your post is somewhat misleading. Those with depression will FEEL down, but depending on the type and severity, don't necessarily have a distorted view of themselves or what is going on around them. Those with depression may realize that everything in their lives are great, but are still FEELING miserable and isolated.
Again, there are different types of depression, but in simple terms, you have situational/environmental depression, and you have clinical depression . Depression because "something happened", is very different than depression caused by brain formation or chemical imbalance caused depression.
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Again, there are different types of depression, but in simple terms, you have situational/environmental depression, and you have clinical depression . Depression because "something happened", is very different than depression caused by brain formation or chemical imbalance caused depression.
Speaking from experience, I can confirm this. I suffered from situational depression for about 3-4 years (my late wife was dying from a degenerative disease at the time). Fortunately, I was able to make a full recovery (though I still have PTSD episodes). But my doctor never recommended any of the "popular" depression meds, because they weren't apropos to my etiology.
Network function: (Score:2)
via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
While the function of the salience network is not exactly known, it has been implicated in the detection and integration of emotional and sensory stimuli, as well as in modulating the switch between the internally directed cognition of the "default mode network" and the externally directed cognition of the "central executive network".
via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Frontostriatal circuits are neural pathways that connect frontal lobe regions with the striatum and mediate motor, cognitive, and behavioural functions within the brain.
Now when people saying I'm being overly sensitive, I can tell them I'm being exactly as sensitive as my salience network in my frontal lobe and that they need to back off. ;)
does this mesh with earlier studies? (Score:2)
There was a report earlier this year that said that using fMRI, they found 6 different types of depression (and a person may have multiple of them at once)
This one found signs in one region of the brain, but is that just one of the types the other study found, or is it just that all of the forms of depression in the earlier study also had this one sign, or that they were all in some larger region?
The real article (Score:2)
TFA is a guardian article, which cites the real article in Nature.
Since this is a "news for nerd" site, and there may be here some neurology nerds, here is the article:
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
PErhaps some neurology nerds could shed some light on the meaning of all of it for us in other fields of nerdyness.
The brain is kind of like a muscle (Score:2)
Not directly correlated, but think of it this way, the more you use it - the more your brain will expand.
So, if you have a lot of problems, your brains is busier solving problems, and thus it needs more connections. In my mind that doesn't sound very scientific, I am kind of laughing at myself for saying this, but to me it kinda makes sense that way.
Rumination (Score:1)
Well, yeah. Depression is, IME, a narcissistic rumination. It's fundamentally a result of an overly-introspective negative outlook on the world. "Poor me."
I personally believe that remaining depressed is completely a choice. You can change your condition and your way of thinking about the world.
The mental skill of rumination - and it is a skill - can be applied to other pursuits quite productively. It doesn't have to fuel depression.
How old were these people? (Score:2)
Depression/mental illness figured out already (Score:3)
I'm sure the people who research this stuff to earn a living will vigorously disagree, and big pharma will also. But what causes depression and other mental illness has been pretty much all figured out. And we know how to cure it (or at least prevent it)
In hunter gatherer societies (there were still quite a few in existence as recently as the 20th century) the incidence of depression and mental illness is zero. Suicides are zero. Seriously. Let that sink in.
For 2 million years of our existence, humans spent 99% of their time outdoors (except for the time spent sleeping, maybe in a cave). For 2 million years humans did physical labor, every day, all day, such as hunting (which involved lots of running) or foraging for food. No one sat around being sedentary doing soul-crushing bullshit spreadsheets and attending pointless idiotic meetings.
The further you get away from this 2 million years of ingrained evolutionary physiology, higher the rate of mental illness and suicides.
In countries outside of the USA, where big pharma does not own the entire government as they do in the USA, they did some studies and found out, making people exercise had a dramatic reduction in depression. Spending more time in the great outdoors had a dramatic reduction in depression. And believe it or not, fasting (not eating food for a few days) had a dramatic reduction in depression.
The first two most people will grasp, but the 3rd one (fasting) is a bit of a head-scratcher. But not really. For 2 million years people were hunter-gathers. There would've been times of plenty of food and times of scacity. Our bodies are exquisitely adapted and evolved to store food during good times (by converting excess food into body fat) and survive the lean times by using up the stored fat. By not using this mechanism, and just build up body fat store and keep building it and building it and never ever using it (which is what most Americans do), your body cries out in protest. It's a huge imbalance. You are MEANT to burn fat for survival once in a while. You are not meant to stuff your fact 6 times a day, every day, 365 times a year. (The average American eats 6.3 times a day). Fasting is not just something religious fanatics used to do 2000 years ago. It's actually something that every human needs to do to, at least once in a while, because our bodies have 2 million years of evolutionary pressure to do this.