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| Depressed Adolescents Have Altered Brain Structure |
| By Health Day News |
| Published: 02/16/2004 |
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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, yet common disease with alarming rates of medical problems and death. And there is evidence that child and adolescent depression leads to adult depression, according to a report in the Jan. 29 issue of BMC Medicine. The hippocampus is associated with motivation, emotional control and memory, and plays a role in controlling the body's response to stress. 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. But in this first study to measure hippocampal size in teens, 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. Researchers believe these results indicate there is a genetic component to major depression, which probably involves several genes. 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. |
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