Depression can damage your brain

Depression can actually cause brain damage.

A study published in Molecular Psychiatry says that recurrent depression shrinks the hippocampus, an area of the brain responsible for forming new memories, which leads to a loss of emotional and behavioral functions.

Brain scans of 9,000 people all over the world have been studied to prove this claim.

Hippocampal shrinkage was pronounced among those for whom depression started early (before the age of 21), as well as people who had recurrent episodes. The recurrence apparently causes the damage.

Researchers used magnetic resonance imaged (MRI) brain scans and clinical data from 1,728 people with major depression and 7,199 healthy individuals, combining 15 datasets from Europe, the USA, and Australia.

Scientia Professor and Head of the School of Psychiatry at UNSW Philip Mitchell confirmed the hippocampus’s vulnerability to depression. Being a part of the brain’s emotional center, the hippocampus isn’t only related to making new memories.

“Your whole sense of self depends on continuously understanding who you are in the world – your state of memory is not about just knowing how to do Sudoku or remembering your password–it’s the whole concept we hold of ourselves,” said Professor Ian Hickie from the Brain and Mind Research Institute. “We’ve seen in a lot of other animal experiments that when you shrink the hippocampus, you don’t just change memory, you change all sorts of other behaviors associated with that–so shrinkage is associated with a loss of function.”

Monash University psychiatry professor Paul Fitzgerald said while the findings of the study were important, they were unlikely to immediately affect clinical treatment since this was merely a part of the puzzle for now. It is helping, though, in the better understanding of depression.

The good news here, however, is that hippocampus is one of the most important regenerative areas of the brain, meaning the effects of depression on the brain are reversible with the right treatment for the individual. Brain damage may not be the end-all for some after all.

Banner photo from www.foxnews.com.