Posted by Hugh on May 16, 2023, at 12:18:11
The researchers recruited 33 patients who had been diagnosed with treatment-resistant major depressive disorder. Twenty-three received SNT treatment [Stanford neuromodulation therapy], and 10 received a sham treatment that mimicked SNT but without magnetic stimulation. They compared data from these patients with that of 85 healthy controls without depression.
When they analyzed fMRI data across the whole brain, one connection stood out. In the normal brain, the anterior insula, a region that integrates bodily sensations, sends signals to a region that governs emotions, the anterior cingulate cortex.
"You could think of it as the anterior cingulate cortex receiving this information about the body--like heart rate or temperature--and then deciding how to feel on the basis of all these signals," Mitra said.
In three-quarters of the participants with depression, however, the typical flow of activity was reversed: The anterior cingulate cortex sent signals to the anterior insula. The more severe the depression, the higher the proportion of signals that traveled the wrong way.
"What we saw is that who's the sender and who's the receiver in the relationship seems to really matter in terms of whether someone is depressed," Mitra said.
"It's almost as if you'd already decided how you were going to feel, and then everything you were sensing was filtered through that," he said. "The mood has become primary."
"That's consistent with how a lot of psychiatrists see depression," he added. "Even things that are quite joyful to a patient normally are suddenly not bringing them any pleasure."
When depressed patients were treated with SNT, the flow of neural activity shifted to the normal direction within a week, coinciding with a lifting of their depression.
Those with the most severe depression--and the most misdirected brain signals--were the most likely to benefit from the treatment.
"We're able to undo the spatio-temporal abnormality so that people's brains look like those of normal, healthy controls," Williams said.
A challenge of treating depression has been the lack of insight into its biological mechanisms. If a patient has a fever, there are various tests--for a bacterial or viral infection, for example--that could determine the appropriate treatment. But for a patient with depression, there are no analogous tests.
"This is the first time in psychiatry where this particular change in a biology--the flow of signals between these two brain regions--predicts the change in clinical symptoms," Williams said.
Not everyone with depression has this abnormal flow of neural activity, and it may be rare in less severe cases of depression, Williams said, but it could serve as an important biomarker for triaging treatment for the disorder. "The fMRI data that allows precision treatment with SNT can be used both as a biomarker for depression and a method of personalized targeting to treat its underlying cause," he said.
"When we get a person with severe depression, we can look for this biomarker to decide how likely they are to respond well to SNT treatment," Mitra said.
"Behavioral conditions like depression have been difficult to capture with imaging because, unlike an obvious brain lesion, they deal with the subtlety of relationships between various parts of the brain," said Raichle, who has studied brain imaging for more than four decades. "It's incredibly promising that the technology now is approaching the complexity of the problems we're trying to understand."
The researchers plan to replicate the study in a larger group of patients. They also hope others will adopt their analytic technique to uncover more clues about the direction of brain activity hidden in fMRI data. "As long as you have good clean fMRI data, you can study this property of the signals," Mitra said.
Full article:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-05-depression-reversing-brain-wrong.html
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