Interesting things I have read
As I pour over tons of articles about MDD I find little things that are interesting. I am pulling out parts of articles that really have me intrigued or gave me hope or stirred something in me and reposting them here with links to the articles themselves if anyone is interested in reading them as well.
This article will be updated as I read more.
The results of the study showed that the participants with the major depressive disorder had a reduced capacity for water permeability in their BBBs. Essentially, for the people with depressive disorder, the water was not as able to move from their blood vessels into brain tissue. The water moved more freely in the participants that were part of the healthy controls. Wengler and his team also reported that the difference in the permeability of the water was notable in the amygdala and hippocampus regions of the brain. Article was on Brain Scans for MDD
This was an "OH WOW!" moment for me; Maybe when you get to the end of the block it will be for you as well.
Liston’s team gathered scans of more than 500 patients with active major depression from five universities across the country. None of the patients had bipolar disorder.
The group created color-coded “maps” to display areas that tended to become active at the same time, and areas that were more likely not to become active together.
In effect, the team created a map of a depressed brain, since some of the “connectivity features” were abnormal and showed up in all these depressed patients.
The next step was matching “connectivity features” to symptoms.
Four subtypes emerged.
Two involved people suffering more serious “anhedonia”— loss of interest in their ordinary activities.
Two other groups involved people who were more anxious.
To test whether the types really described depression and not mental illness generally, the team analyzed scans of 75 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia but not depression. Almost none fit into the depression subtypes.
Using another set of scans that included people who were not depressed, the team tested whether the markers they had found could predict who was. The answer was yes, with 80 to 90 percent accuracy.
You can find the whole article here.
By using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a large multisite sample (n = 1,188), we show here that patients with depression can be subdivided into four neurophysiological subtypes (‘biotypes’) defined by distinct patterns of dysfunctional connectivity in limbic and frontostriatal networks. Clustering patients on this basis enabled the development of diagnostic classifiers (biomarkers) with high (82–93%) sensitivity and specificity for depression subtypes in multisite validation (n = 711) and out-of-sample replication (n = 477) data sets. These biotypes cannot be differentiated solely on the basis of clinical features, but they are associated with differing clinical-symptom profiles.
Read more here.
This article will be updated as I read more.
The results of the study showed that the participants with the major depressive disorder had a reduced capacity for water permeability in their BBBs. Essentially, for the people with depressive disorder, the water was not as able to move from their blood vessels into brain tissue. The water moved more freely in the participants that were part of the healthy controls. Wengler and his team also reported that the difference in the permeability of the water was notable in the amygdala and hippocampus regions of the brain. Article was on Brain Scans for MDD
This was an "OH WOW!" moment for me; Maybe when you get to the end of the block it will be for you as well.
Liston’s team gathered scans of more than 500 patients with active major depression from five universities across the country. None of the patients had bipolar disorder.
The group created color-coded “maps” to display areas that tended to become active at the same time, and areas that were more likely not to become active together.
In effect, the team created a map of a depressed brain, since some of the “connectivity features” were abnormal and showed up in all these depressed patients.
The next step was matching “connectivity features” to symptoms.
Four subtypes emerged.
Two involved people suffering more serious “anhedonia”— loss of interest in their ordinary activities.
Two other groups involved people who were more anxious.
To test whether the types really described depression and not mental illness generally, the team analyzed scans of 75 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia but not depression. Almost none fit into the depression subtypes.
Using another set of scans that included people who were not depressed, the team tested whether the markers they had found could predict who was. The answer was yes, with 80 to 90 percent accuracy.
You can find the whole article here.
By using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a large multisite sample (n = 1,188), we show here that patients with depression can be subdivided into four neurophysiological subtypes (‘biotypes’) defined by distinct patterns of dysfunctional connectivity in limbic and frontostriatal networks. Clustering patients on this basis enabled the development of diagnostic classifiers (biomarkers) with high (82–93%) sensitivity and specificity for depression subtypes in multisite validation (n = 711) and out-of-sample replication (n = 477) data sets. These biotypes cannot be differentiated solely on the basis of clinical features, but they are associated with differing clinical-symptom profiles.
Read more here.