Zhuang Yunyue, Song Weijie, Kuang Shenbing, Li Wei, Pan Shujuan, Wang Zhiren, Qu Wei, Chen Jingxu, Tan Yunlong, Wang Chundi, Deng Hu
Department of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, National Center for Children's Health, Beijing Children's Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, China.
Peking University Huilongguan Clinical Medical School, Beijing Huilongguan Hospital, Beijing, China.
Depress Anxiety. 2025 May 20;2025:7376934. doi: 10.1155/da/7376934. eCollection 2025.
Major depressive disorder (MDD) patients are often associated with inhibition deficits in the visual cortex. Most previous research has focused on visual inhibition in MDD patients during acute and remission phases, with little research on first-episode and drug-naïve (FEDN) patients. To fill this gap, we psychophysically investigated the inhibitory process of visual motion in patients with FEDN MDD. Two psychophysical tasks: Center-Surround Suppression (CSS) and Motion Repulsion (MR) were utilized to investigate the presence of visual perceptual inhibition deficits in patients with FEDN MDD. We collected data from 74 patients with FEDN MDD and 68 healthy controls (HCs) matched for age, years of education, and gender. We also measured the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, 17-item (HAMD-17) for each patient to assess the severity of depressive symptoms. The results showed that CSS was significantly deteriorated in FEDN MDD patients (=0.001), but it did not correlate with the HAMD score ( > 0.05). In addition, no significant differences were observed between the two groups of subjects in terms of gender, age, and education level (all > 0.05). Analysis of two previously published datasets using the same CSS task involving MDD patients in different illness stages revealed that the levels of CSS reduction in our FEDN patients were also significantly distinguishable from those in acute and recovered MDD patients (all < 0.01). This quantitative comparison indicates that CSS impairments are dynamic over the course of illness development. Moreover, the magnitudes of MR showed no significant differences between MDD patients and HCs (all > 0.05). Our study was the first to demonstrate the deteriorated CSS in patients with FEDN MDD. Notably, inhibitory deficits in MDD are also highly specific, as MDD affects only the CSS, but not the MR. Therefore, the discrepancy between these two psychophysical tasks suggests CSS may serve as a feasible early marker in MDD. These findings offer new insights into the specific visual cortical deficits in patients with FEDN MDD. The current study lacks imaging data to support the perceptual phenomenon we observed.
重度抑郁症（MDD）患者通常与视觉皮层的抑制缺陷有关。以往的大多数研究都集中在MDD患者急性期和缓解期的视觉抑制，而对首发且未用药（FEDN）的患者研究较少。为填补这一空白，我们采用心理物理学方法研究了FEDN MDD患者视觉运动的抑制过程。我们利用两项心理物理学任务：中心-外周抑制（CSS）和运动排斥（MR）来研究FEDN MDD患者是否存在视觉感知抑制缺陷。我们收集了74例FEDN MDD患者和68例年龄、受教育年限和性别匹配的健康对照（HC）的数据。我们还为每位患者测量了17项汉密尔顿抑郁量表（HAMD-17）以评估抑郁症状的严重程度。结果显示，FEDN MDD患者的CSS显著恶化（=0.001），但它与HAMD评分无相关性（>0.05）。此外，两组受试者在性别、年龄和教育水平方面均未观察到显著差异（均>0.05）。对两个先前发表的使用相同CSS任务涉及不同疾病阶段MDD患者的数据集进行分析发现，我们FEDN患者的CSS降低水平也与急性期和康复期MDD患者的水平有显著差异（均<0.01）。这种定量比较表明CSS损伤在疾病发展过程中是动态变化的。此外，MDD患者和HC之间的MR幅度无显著差异（均>0.05）。我们的研究首次证明了FEDN MDD患者的CSS恶化。值得注意的是，MDD中的抑制缺陷也具有高度特异性，因为MDD仅影响CSS，而不影响MR。因此，这两项心理物理学任务之间的差异表明CSS可能是MDD中一个可行的早期标志物。这些发现为FEDN MDD患者特定的视觉皮层缺陷提供了新的见解。目前的研究缺乏成像数据来支持我们观察到的感知现象。
