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Imaging vulnerability for depression

Molecular Psychiatry volume 16, pages 1067–1068 (2011)Cite this article

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Spontaneous fluctuations in blood oxygenation level-dependent signal, as measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), has proved to be a valuable tool for probing neural function, architecture and psychopathology. Over the past decade, a converging corpus has identified a series of canonical resting-state networks corresponding to divergent functions including motor, visual and auditory processing, executive/cognitive control and self-referential processing.1 Moreover, there is increasing evidence to suggest that these networks may be disrupted in depression,2, 3 and it has been suggested that increased default-mode (also referred to as task-negative) network connectivity, mediated via a region of the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (termed the dorsal nexus), may underlie the ruminative, introspective focus that is characteristic of depression.3 Here, we wished to test the hypothesis that increased connectivity from the dorsal nexus to the default-mode network (DMN) would be present in adolescents at increased familial risk of depression but with no personal history of mood disorder.

We included 15 participants who had never personally suffered from major depression but who had a biological parent with a history of major depression (family history positive (FH)) and 15 healthy controls (HCs) (see Supplementary Materials/Supplementary Table 1 for details). Resting-state data were acquired on a Siemens Sonata 1.5T whole-body scanner located at the Oxford Centre for Magnetic Resonance Research (OCMR), University of Oxford (see Supplementary Methods for acquisition details). During resting-state acquisition subjects were instructed to keep their eyes open and watch a fixation cross presented on a screen positioned at the foot of the scanner bore. Resting MRI analysis was carried out using Multivariate Exploratory Linear Optimized Decomposition into Independent Components implemented within FSL4 (see Supplementary methods for details).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University Department of Psychiatry, Warneford Hospital, Headington, Oxford, UK

    R Norbury, Z Mannie & P J Cowen

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  1. R Norbury
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  2. Z Mannie
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  3. P J Cowen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to R Norbury.

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Competing interests

RN and ZM declare no conflict of interest. PJC has been a paid member of the advisory boards for Eli Liley, Servier and Lundbeck and has been a paid lecturer for Eli Liley, Servier, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca.

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Supplementary Information accompanies the paper on the Molecular Psychiatry website

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Norbury, R., Mannie, Z. & Cowen, P. Imaging vulnerability for depression. Mol Psychiatry 16, 1067–1068 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/mp.2011.44

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