Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Curium-Leiden University Medical Center Oegstgeest, Netherlands ; Brain and Development Lab, Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology, Institute of Psychology, Leiden University Leiden, Netherlands ; Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University Leiden, Netherlands.
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Curium-Leiden University Medical Center Oegstgeest, Netherlands ; Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University Leiden, Netherlands.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2014 Jun 5;8:393. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00393. eCollection 2014.
Depressive and anxiety disorders are often first diagnosed during adolescence and it is known that they persist into adulthood. Previous studies often tried to dissociate depressive and anxiety disorders, but high comorbidity makes this difficult and maybe even impossible. The goal of this study was to use neuroimaging to test what the unique contribution is of depression and anxiety symptomatology on emotional processing and amygdala activation, and to compare the results with a healthy control group. We included 25 adolescents with depressive and/or anxiety disorders and 26 healthy adolescents. Participants performed an emotional face processing task while in the MRI scanner. We were particularly interested in the relation between depression/anxiety symptomatology and patterns of amygdala activation. There were no significant differences in activation patterns between the control group and the clinical group on whole brain level and ROI level. However, we found that dimensional scores on an anxiety but not a depression subscale significantly predicted brain activation in the right amygdala when processing fearful, happy and neutral faces. These results suggest that anxiety symptoms are a better predictor for differentiating activation patterns in the amygdala than depression symptoms. Although the current study includes a relatively large sample of treatment naïve adolescents with depression/anxiety disorders, results might be influenced by differences between studies in recruitment strategies or methodology. Future research should include larger samples with a more equal distribution of adolescents with a clinical diagnosis of depression and/or anxiety. To conclude, this study shows that abnormal amygdala responses to emotional faces in depression and anxiety seems to be more dependent on anxiety symptoms than on depression symptoms, and thereby highlights the need for more research to better characterize clinical groups in future studies.
抑郁和焦虑障碍通常在青春期首次诊断出来，已知它们会持续到成年。以前的研究经常试图将抑郁和焦虑障碍分开，但高共病性使得这很难，甚至可能不可能。本研究的目的是使用神经影像学来测试抑郁和焦虑症状对情绪处理和杏仁核激活的独特贡献，并将结果与健康对照组进行比较。我们纳入了 25 名患有抑郁和/或焦虑障碍的青少年和 26 名健康青少年。参与者在 MRI 扫描仪中执行情绪面孔处理任务。我们特别关注抑郁/焦虑症状与杏仁核激活模式之间的关系。在全脑水平和 ROI 水平上，对照组和临床组之间的激活模式没有显著差异。然而，我们发现，在处理恐惧、快乐和中性面孔时，焦虑子量表的维度得分而不是抑郁子量表的维度得分显著预测了右杏仁核的大脑激活。这些结果表明，与抑郁症状相比，焦虑症状是区分杏仁核激活模式的更好预测因子。尽管本研究包括了一个相对较大的、未经治疗的患有抑郁/焦虑障碍的青少年样本，但结果可能会受到研究在招募策略或方法上的差异的影响。未来的研究应包括更大的样本，更均衡地分布有临床诊断为抑郁和/或焦虑的青少年。总之，这项研究表明，抑郁和焦虑症患者对情绪面孔的杏仁核反应似乎更依赖于焦虑症状，而不是抑郁症状，从而强调需要进一步研究，以便在未来的研究中更好地描述临床群体。
