
AsianScientist (Nov. 3, 2016) – Researchers in China and the UK have uncovered insights into the physical root of depression. Their work, published in Brain, could herald a breakthrough in treating depression by going to the root cause of the illness and help depressed people to stop focusing on negative thoughts.
The study, led by Professor Feng Jianfeng from both University of Warwick and Fudan University in Shanghai, employed almost 1,000 participants in China, who had their brains scanned using high precision MRI. From these scans, the researchers analyzed the connections between the medial and lateral orbitofrontal cortex—the different parts of the human brain affected by depression.
The study shows that depression affects the part of the brain which is implicated in non-reward, the lateral orbitofrontal cortex, so that sufferers of the disease feel a sense of loss and disappointment associated with not receiving rewards. This area of the brain, which becomes active when rewards are not received, is also connected with the part of the brain which is involved in one’s sense of self, thus potentially leading to thoughts of personal loss and low self-esteem.
“More than one in ten people in their life time suffer from depression, a disease which is so common in modern society and we can even find the remains of Prozac (a depression drug) in the tap water in London,” said Feng.
“Our finding, with the combination of big data we collected around the world and our novel methods, enables us to locate the roots of depression which should open up new avenues for better therapeutic treatments in the near future for this horrible disease.”
The article can be found at: Cheng et al. (2016) Medial Reward and Lateral Non-Reward Orbitofrontal Cortex Circuits Change in Opposite Directions in Depression.
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Source: University of Warwick.
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