Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
New researchBrain Structural Signatures of Adolescent Depressive Symptom Trajectories: A Longitudinal Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were those from the Orygen Adolescent Development Study (ADS). The ADS is a longitudinal study aimed at providing insight into risk and resilience factors for depression during adolescence (for a detailed description of the ADS study and selection criteria, see Whittle et al.20). Neuroimaging data were collected at wave 1, wave 3, and wave 4. For the present study, we included a subgroup of 149 participants from whom structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data were available
Results
Demographic and clinical characteristics are presented in Table 1. The different trajectory groups did not differ in sex (χ2[2, n = 149] = 1.91, p = .39), age at each wave (wave 1 F2,121 = 1.56, p = .21; wave 3 F2,129 = 1.40, p = .25; wave 4 F2,94 = 0.67, p = .51), SES (F2,141 = 1.19, p = .31), IQ (F2,131 = 1.14, p = .87), parental history of depression (χ2[2, n = 117] = 3.68, p = .16), and pubertal stage (F2,117 = 2.72, p = .07). Information on CES-D scores and global functioning for each
Discussion
This study investigated whether different longitudinal trajectories of depressive symptoms were associated with developmental changes in the gray matter of cortical and subcortical brain regions during adolescence. We found evidence for alterations in structural development in the group of adolescents who showed depressive symptoms early in adolescence that decreased over time (early-decreasing symptoms group), specifically for surface area of the ACC and OFC. These effects were moderated by
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2021, Journal of Affective DisordersCitation Excerpt :What mechanisms could account for our results? A major contributor may be the well documented sex differences in brain development, which are believed to play a mechanistic role in the emergence of sex disparities in rates of affective disorders (Andre et al., 2020; Schmaal et al., 2017; Whittle et al., 2014). More specifically, there is some (albeit limited) evidence that some features of brain development unfold faster (hence at an earlier age) in girls than in boys (see Lenroot and Giedd, 2010 for a review; also see Giedd et al., 1999).
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This research was supported by grants from the Colonial Foundation, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC; Program Grant 350241) of Australia, and the Australian Research Council (Discovery Grant DP0878136). Dr. Schmaal gratefully acknowledges support from the foundation De Drie Lichten in The Netherlands, The Netherlands Brain Foundation (F2014[1]-24), and the Neuroscience Campus Amsterdam (IPB-SE-15-PSYCH-Schmaal). Dr. Yücel was supported by the NHMRC of Australia (ID APP1021973), and Dr. Whittle is supported by an NHMRC Career Development Fellowship (ID 1007716).
Disclosure: Drs. Schmaal, Yücel, Ellis, Vijayakumar, Simmons, Allen, and Whittle report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.