PET/MRI findings ‘encouraging’ for people with late-life depression

PET/MRI scans have revealed positive findings for people with late-life depression – namely that they have preserved “synaptic density" and thus are likely to respond to treatment, according to a group in Belgium. Neuroscientists at the Leuven Brain Institute used hybrid brain imaging to explore connections between synaptic density (on PET) and gray-matter volume (on MRI) for the first time in a group of depressed patients, with a link between the two thought to be involved in neurodegenerative diseases. “In contrast to Alzheimer’s disease, lower gray matter volume in late-life depression is not associated with synaptic density changes,” noted lead author Thomas Vande Casteele, MD, and colleagues. The study was published March 14 in Translational Psychiatry. Late-life depression has been consistently associated with lower gray-matter volume, the origin of which remains largely unexplained, the authors wrote. Recent PET findings in early-onset depression and Alzheimer’s disease suggest that synaptic deficits contribute to the pathophysiology of these disorders and therefore contribute to lower gray-matter volume, they suggested. However, the hypothesis linking synaptic density with depression has only been investigated in animal stress studies and postmortem depression studies focusing on the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, the authors added. Thus, in this study, the researchers performed a prospective analysis to measure synaptic density and gray-matter vo...
Source: AuntMinnie.com Headlines - Category: Radiology Authors: Tags: MRI Source Type: news