Thin brained people more at risk for depression

William Atkins
Wednesday, 25 March 2009 20:04

Science - Biology

Dr. Peterson added, “The more thinning you have, the greater the cognitive problems. If you have additional thinning in the same region of the left hemisphere, that seems to tip you over from having a vulnerability to developing symptoms of an overt illness."

The Columbia article continues to say, “Dr. Peterson says the thinner cortex may increase the risk of developing depression by disrupting a person’s ability to pay attention to, and interpret, social and emotional cues from other people. Additional tests measured each person’s level of inattention to and memory for such cues. The less brain material a person had in the right cortex, the worse they performed on the attention and memory tests.”

The researchers studied the brains of 131 people who ranged in ages from six to 54 years. They were already participating in the study “Children at High and Low Risk of Depression,” which was started 27 years ago.

Some of the people had a history of depression in their families, while others did not.

Dr. Peterson commented, “If the mechanism–or pathway to illness–indeed runs from the thinning of the cortex to these cognitive problems that affect a person’s attention and their ability to -- interpret social and emotional cues -- it would suggest that there may be potential treatments or novel uses of already existing treatments for intervention.”

Peterson adds, “For example, either behavioral therapies that aim to improve attention and memory and/or stimulant medications currently used for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), may surface as possible treatments for people who have familial depression and this pattern of cortical thinning, in a highly personalized form of medical decision-making and treatment, for it may be that treating their inattention could improve their processing of social information.”

He concludes, “This conjecture is entirely speculative at this point, but it is a logical hypothesis to test based on the findings from this study.”