Aperiodic neural activity is a biomarker for depression severity

Abstract

A reliable physiological biomarker for Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is necessary to improve treatment success rates by shoring up variability in outcome measures. In this study, we establish a passive biomarker that tracks with changes in mood on the order of minutes to hours. We record from intracranial electrodes implanted deep in the brain – a surgical setting providing exquisite temporal and spatial sensitivity to detect this relationship in a difficult-to-measure brain area, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC). The aperiodic slope of the power spectral density captures the balance of activity across all frequency bands and is construed as a putative proxy for excitatory/inhibitory balance in the brain. This study demonstrates how shifts in aperiodic slope correlate with depression severity in a clinical trial of deep brain stimulation for treatment-resistant depression (TRD). The correlation between depression severity scores and aperiodic slope is significant in N=5 subjects, indicating that flatter (less negative) slopes correspond to reduced depression severity, especially in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. This biomarker offers a new way to track patient response to MDD treatment, facilitating individualized therapies in both intracranial and non-invasive monitoring scenarios.One sentence summaryThe aperiodic component of the power spectral density robustly tracks depression severity on the order of minutes to hours.

Pupil-linked arousal reflects intracranial aperiodic neural activity in the human auditory cortex

“…The intermediate frequencies re ect the region of transition from high-to-low frequencies, such that increased delta power and decreased gamma power will have a steep slope in the transition region, whereas low delta power and increased gamma power should have a atter slope 59 .…”