14 DAY TRIAL // Canadian investigators from the University of Toronto believe they may have discovered a new method of predicting whether former depression patients will experience a relapse. Their approach is based on studying the neural activity these individuals display when experiencing mild states of sadness.
The group says that data collected during such episodes can make it clear to experts where a relapse is imminent or not. If this method proves effective, then it could contribute to reducing the incidence of such relapses considerably.
In a new set of experiments, scientists asked 16 test participants to watch a series of sad movie clips. All of the test subjects were former depression patients. While they were watching the videos, the team was monitoring their neural activity.
The participants were hooked to functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machines, which tracked the patterns of blood flow developing in their brains. After 16 months, the researchers followed the patients again.
Nine of the original 16 had experienced a relapse in their condition. At that time, the researchers compared the neural activity patterns of the two groups in order to tease out the differences. For the second study, a control group of healthy volunteers was also used.
Interestingly, it was demonstrated that relapsing patients tended to exhibit increased neural activity in an area of the brain associated with obsessive thinking, called the medial prefrontal gyrus.
Patients who did not relapse one and a hald years later displayed increased activity in the back of the brain, in areas usually associated with processing visual stimuli. Feelings of acceptance and non-judgment of experience are also based here, experts say.
“Despite achieving an apparent recovery from the symptoms of depression, this study suggests that there are important differences in how formerly depressed people respond to emotional challenges that predict future well-being,” Norman Farb explains..
“Part of what makes depression such a devastating disease is the high rate of relapse,” adds the investigator, who is a PhD psychology student at the University of Toronto. He is also the lead author of a new study detailing the findings, which appears in the journal Biological Psychiatry.
“However, the fact that some patients are able to fully maintain their recovery suggests the possibility that different responses to the type of emotional challenges encountered in everyday life could reduce the chance of relapse,” the investigator adds.
“For a person with a history of depression, using the frontal brain’s ability to analyze and interpret sadness may actually be an unhealthy reaction that can perpetuate the chronic cycle of depression,” Farb says, quoted by PsychCentral.
“These at-risk individuals might be better served by trying to accept and notice their feelings rather than explain and analyze them,” he concludes.