The adult brain can be resistant to rapid changes. Chronic depression can be very hard to shake if our brain's structure traps us in dark moods and thoughts.
Some patients with major depression can have their brains wired in a few weeks.
Scientists in Germany claim that treatments like anti-depressants and behavioral therapy can change brain structures. It's not known how long those changes will last.
People who experience MDD have a hard time regulating their emotions. It can be hard to enjoy the most pleasant activities under such heavy conditions.
Brain scans have shown that depression is associated with changes in the volume of gray matter and white matter. The hippocampus plays a major role in learning and memory and is associated with increases in amygdala activity.
The treatment-resistant MDD is marked by changes in the brain.
If there is a strong link between the structure of a human brain and the function of depression, it could be very beneficial.
Researchers disagree on whether the link is reliable.
The researchers think it is.
The 35th annual European College of Neuroscience in Vienna hosted their new study presentation. Some of the structural brain features found in MDD patients were alleviated when antidepressants were successful.
Patients with MDD had their brains scanned before treatment began. In the past, patients were treated with a combination of therapies.
Patients had their brains scanned after six weeks. 55 healthy people were compared with the before and after results.
Patients with the greatest symptom improvements showed the most structural brain changes. The effects of treatment were not related to the amount of time that had passed.
Jonathan Repple said they were surprised at the speed of response.
There is no explanation as to how these changes happen or why they should happen with different forms of treatment.
It's difficult to connect an improvement to structural changes in the brain with the results of randomized controlled trials.
ECT appears to be the most effective and rapid treatment of the bunch, though it comes with more side effects and scientists are still trying to figure out the most successful regime.
ECT works by passing an electrical current through a patient's brain while they are under general anesthesia, and in mouse studies it seems to improve communication between parts of the brain. New brain cells were found in the hippocampus of ECT- treated mice.
Similar results have been found in human studies. The brain structures of some MDD patients weremoulded by ECT in 2015.
Altered brain activity in the prefrontal cortex is linked to mental imagery and memory and is associated with the use of anti-depressant drugs.
Despite being evidence-based, depression treatments do not always result in the same levels of brain changes.
Human emotions are very complex and the brain is very complex. Piecing the two together isn't easy, but that hasn't stopped Repple from trying.
Eric Ruhe, who was not involved in the current study, praised Repple and his colleagues for the difficulty of their previous paper.
The study still needs to be replicated in independent samples, but the results align very much with our belief that the brain has more flexibility in adapting over time than was previously thought.
The brain structure of patients with serious clinical depression is not as fixed as we thought, and we can improve it within six weeks.
Patients with a disease have to live with it forever because it is "set in stone" in their brain.
The work was presented at a neuroscience conference.
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