Subcortical brain alterations in major depressive disorder: findings from the ENIGMA Major Depressive Disorder working group
UMass Chan Affiliations
Department of Quantitative Health SciencesDocument Type
Journal ArticlePublication Date
2016-06-01
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The pattern of structural brain alterations associated with major depressive disorder (MDD) remains unresolved. This is in part due to small sample sizes of neuroimaging studies resulting in limited statistical power, disease heterogeneity and the complex interactions between clinical characteristics and brain morphology. To address this, we meta-analyzed three-dimensional brain magnetic resonance imaging data from 1728 MDD patients and 7199 controls from 15 research samples worldwide, to identify subcortical brain volumes that robustly discriminate MDD patients from healthy controls. Relative to controls, patients had significantly lower hippocampal volumes (Cohen's d=-0.14, % difference=-1.24). This effect was driven by patients with recurrent MDD (Cohen's d=-0.17, % difference=-1.44), and we detected no differences between first episode patients and controls. Age of onset 21 was associated with a smaller hippocampus (Cohen's d=-0.20, % difference=-1.85) and a trend toward smaller amygdala (Cohen's d=-0.11, % difference=-1.23) and larger lateral ventricles (Cohen's d=0.12, % difference=5.11). Symptom severity at study inclusion was not associated with any regional brain volumes. Sample characteristics such as mean age, proportion of antidepressant users and proportion of remitted patients, and methodological characteristics did not significantly moderate alterations in brain volumes in MDD. Samples with a higher proportion of antipsychotic medication users showed larger caudate volumes in MDD patients compared with controls. This currently largest worldwide effort to identify subcortical brain alterations showed robust smaller hippocampal volumes in MDD patients, moderated by age of onset and first episode versus recurrent episode status.Source
Mol Psychiatry. 2016 Jun;21(6):806-12. doi: 10.1038/mp.2015.69. Epub 2015 Jun 30. Link to article on publisher's site.DOI
10.1038/mp.2015.69Permanent Link to this Item
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14038/40018PubMed ID
26122586Notes
Full author list omitted for brevity. For full list of authors see article.
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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1038/mp.2015.69
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