People with depression have a part of their brain almost twice as large as healthy individuals, American researchers have discovered.
This change means that signs of the mental health condition can be seen in those as young as 10, before symptoms start to appear later. Experts hope that their discovery could form the basis of future therapeutic treatments that would address the harmful structural changes in the brain.
Publishing their results in Nature, experts from Weill Cornell Medicine in New York looked at brain scans of 141 adults with depression and compared them to 37 controls.
They found that a set of brain regions associated with attention to rewards and threats, called the salient frontostriatal network, was larger in those with depression. The researchers then examined whether this change in brain structure could be found in children before they developed depression as teenagers.
To do this, they examined scans of 57 children taken when they were between 10 and 12 years old, who later developed depression at age 13 or 14. The authors compared these scans with an equal number of children from the same study who did not go on to develop depression. They found that the prominent frontostriatal network in the children who developed depression was about a third larger than in the controls.
The authors write: "These results indicate that cortical expansion of the salience network is a feature similar to brain network organization that is stable over weeks, months, and years, unaffected by mood state, and detectable in children before the onset of depressive symptoms in adolescence."
They said their results suggested that children's brain scans could potentially be used as a marker of the risk of depression in adolescence. However, they added that further studies are needed to confirm their findings. According to data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), around one in six adults in the UK experienced moderate to severe symptoms of depression in 2022. It also comes after it was revealed earlier this year that almost a quarter of children in England now have a 'probable mental disorder', according to an ONS report. The rate of these disorders, recorded based on responses to a questionnaire from eight to 16-year-olds, is on the rise. The data for 2023 suggested that 23.3 per cent of children had a possible mental disorder, such as anxiety or depression, up from 19 per cent the year before.
Experts have previously highlighted the impact of the Covid pandemic and the disruption it caused to children's education and social lives, alongside the cost of living crisis and social media as damaging to children's mental well-being.
While most people will go through periods of feeling down, those who feel consistently sad for weeks or months should seek help from their GP. Treatment for depression varies according to severity. When it's mild, a GP may suggest exercise or talking therapy. Those with severe cases may be prescribed a combination of therapy and medication such as antidepressants. /DailyMail
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