Pannekoek Justine Nienke, van der Werff Steven J A, van den Bulk Bianca G, van Lang Natasja D J, Rombouts Serge A R B, van Buchem Mark A, Vermeiren Robert R J M, van der Wee Nic J A
Department of Psychiatry, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, The Netherlands ; Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University, The Netherlands ; Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa.
Department of Psychiatry, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, The Netherlands ; Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University, The Netherlands.
Neuroimage Clin. 2014 Jan 18;4:336-42. doi: 10.1016/j.nicl.2014.01.007. eCollection 2014.
Adolescent depression is associated with increased risk for suicidality, social and educational impairment, smoking, substance use, obesity, and depression in adulthood. It is of relevance to further our insight in the neurobiological mechanisms underlying this disorder in the developing brain, as this may be essential to optimize treatment and prevention of adolescent depression and its negative clinical trajectories. The equivocal findings of the limited number of studies on neural abnormalities in depressed youth stress the need for further neurobiological investigation of adolescent depression. We therefore performed a voxel-based morphometry study of the hippocampus, amygdala, superior temporal gyrus, and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in 26 treatment-naïve, clinically depressed adolescents and 26 pair-wise matched healthy controls. Additionally, an exploratory whole-brain analysis was performed. Clinically depressed adolescents showed a volume reduction of the bilateral dorsal ACC compared to healthy controls. However, no association was found between gray matter volume of the ACC and clinical severity scores for depression or anxiety. Our finding of a smaller ACC in clinically depressed adolescents is consistent with literature on depressed adults. Future research is needed to investigate if gray matter abnormalities precede or follow clinical depression in adolescents.
青少年抑郁症与自杀倾向、社交和教育障碍、吸烟、物质使用、肥胖以及成年期抑郁症的风险增加有关。进一步了解发育中大脑中这种疾病的神经生物学机制具有重要意义，因为这对于优化青少年抑郁症的治疗和预防及其负面临床轨迹可能至关重要。关于抑郁青少年神经异常的研究数量有限，结果不一，这凸显了对青少年抑郁症进行进一步神经生物学研究的必要性。因此，我们对26名未经治疗的临床抑郁症青少年和26名配对的健康对照者进行了基于体素的海马体、杏仁核、颞上回和前扣带回皮质（ACC）形态测量研究。此外，还进行了探索性全脑分析。与健康对照者相比，临床抑郁症青少年双侧背侧ACC体积减小。然而，未发现ACC灰质体积与抑郁或焦虑的临床严重程度评分之间存在关联。我们发现临床抑郁症青少年的ACC较小，这与成年抑郁症患者的文献一致。未来需要研究灰质异常在青少年临床抑郁症之前还是之后出现。
