By Symptoms of depression fluctuate over time, but many brain imaging studies of the condition only study one point in time. That’s made it hard to connect networks of brain activity to various symptoms and mood changes. Now, a new study using long-term brain imaging data shows one brain network involved in guiding attention is nearly two times larger in patients with depression than in people not experiencing depression symptoms, and stays larger even as depressive symptoms ebb and flow.
“Honestly, when we started this project, we weren’t expecting necessarily to find stable, traitlike differences in brain [activity patterns] in people with depression,” says Charles Lynch, a neuroscientist at Weill Cornell Medical College. “We were more interested in looking for things that would change over time as their symptoms fluctuate.” The results, published September 4 in Nature, could help improve various types of brain stimulation therapies for depression (SN: 9/21/23).
