Researchers have discovered a way to identify children who are at risk of developing depression later in life by looking at their brain activity. A new study found that children who are at risk of developing depression are differently wired than those who have no family history of the mental disorder.
Popular Science reported that the study involved 43 children between the ages of 8 to 14 years old. More than half of the participants were considered "at risk" of one day suffering from depression because a family member or close relative has been diagnosed with the condition.
All 43 participants were hooked into a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine to map out their brain activity. The researchers then studied the data to look into what is called the resting-state functional connectivity or the pattern for communication when the brain is at rest.
According to the study, children at risk of the mental illness are found to have a "strong" link between the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex and the default mode network. This is not particularly surprising because the same pattern has been discovered before in depressed adults.
Moreover, these children also exhibit a strong connection between the amygdala and the inferior frontal gyrus, which control the person's emotions. In contrast, the connection between the parietal and frontal cortex, responsible for decision-making, appears to be inferior.
The researchers revealed that the study yielded "high-accuracy," enabling them to easily identify which children are at risk based on their fMRI scans. This also means that doctors will be able to easily detect depression before it even sets in.
"We'd like to develop the tools to be able to identify people at true risk, independent of why they got there, with the ultimate goal of maybe intervening early and not waiting for depression to strike the person," John Gabrieli, author of the study, told MIT. "If you can avoid that first bout, maybe it would put the person on a different trajectory."
