Altered White Matter Microstructure in Adolescents With Major Depression: A Preliminary Study

Affective Symptoms and White Matter Changes in Brain Tumor Patients

“…The orbitofrontal cortex is part of the medial prefrontal network and is considered essential for reward-based decision-making; it is known to be dysfunctional in affective disorders (25). There have been demonstrations of associations between severity of depressive symptoms and WM integrity in the right uncinate fasciculus in depressive patients and in patients with a history of brain concussion (6,8,28,36), but this is the first report of a correlation between affective symptoms and FA in the right uncinate fasciculus in brain tumor patients. We used an ROI approach to analysis of FA scores in data acquired with a 1.5 Tesla MRI system.…”

Cortico-limbic network abnormalities in individuals with current and past major depressive disorder

“…Accordingly, fronto-temporal white matter abnormalities are frequently reported in MDD and UF is probably the white matter tract that is the most frequently implicated in diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) studies (Cullen et al, 2010;Taylor et al, 2007;Dalby et al, 2010;Hettema et al, 2012;Zhang et al, 2012). The correlations that we have reported here between volumetric changes in the left UF cluster and levels of depression measured by BDI and MASQ are comparable to findings from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) studies that found inverse correlation between fractional anisotropy in UF and depression scores (McIntosh et al, 2013;Zhang et al, 2012).…”

In pursuit of neuroimaging biomarkers to guide treatment selection in major depressive disorder: a review of the literature

“…Fractional anisotropy (FA), a measure of white matter coherence (and an indirect measure of the integrity of white matter circuits), is reduced as a result of impairments in the myelination of axons or axonal membranes and/or of a decreased density of axons. FA reductions have been found in frontal regions (e.g., superior and middle frontal white matter, and body/genu of the corpus callosum), [56][57][58][59][60][61] white matter tracts interconnecting limbic areas (e.g., anterior cingulum, fornix, and uncinate fasciculus), 58,62,63 and thalamocortical white matter relays 57,64 primarily in elderly patients, but also in middle-aged and young patients with recurrent MDD. In addition to prior work showing gray matter volumetric changes within regions that are interconnected by these abnormal white matter tracts, 13,25,65 this body of DTI studies is consistent with a dysfunctional neural network 66 in depressed patients.…”