Association between hippocampal volume change and change in memory following electroconvulsive therapy in late‐life depression

Abstract

Laroy M, Bouckaert F, Vansteelandt K, et al. Association between hippocampal volume change and change in memory following electroconvulsive therapy in late-life depression.Objective: Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)-induced hippocampal volume change (HVC) has been repeatedly described in recent years. The similar time course of HVC and ECT-related cognitive effects suggest a relation, that is to date, understudied. This study investigates whether HVC following ECT predicts the change in memory performance six months after the end of the ECT treatment. Methods: Hippocampal volume (HV) was measured via high-resolution 3D T1weighted images in 88 patients with late-life depression, within 1 week before and after ECT. Memory performance was assessed before and six months after ECT. Multiple linear regression was used to examine whether change in memory performance could be predicted based on ECT-induced changes in HV. Results: Larger right absolute HVC predicts less pronounced improvement on the VAT (visual memory) in the whole sample. For the 8-Word Test (verbal memory), Category Fluency Test (semantic memory), and MMSE, the effect is only present in patients who switched from right unilateral to bitemporal stimulation after six ECT sessions. Absolute HVC in the left hemisphere was not significantly related to cognitive change. Conclusion: A larger absolute change in right HV during ECT is associated with less improvement in memory performance up to 6 months post-ECT.

Short and long-term effects of single and multiple sessions of electroconvulsive therapy on brain gray matter volumes

“…However, given the high number of models tested and the uncorrected level of significance, also these findings should be interpreted with caution. Indeed, despite recent findings of a significant association between hippocampal volume change and cognitive impairments [52,53], no relationship between hippocampal volume increase and subjective and autobiographic memory measures was observed in our study.…”

Meta-analysis of brain structural changes after electroconvulsive therapy in depression

“…3). However, the association did not remain significant when excluding data of Laroy et al [45]. Secondly, all 16 studies (N ¼ 406) were included where the effect size estimates on bilateral changes in hippocampal volume had to be calculated from data on changes in the left and right hemisphere for six studies that did not report bilateral data.…”

Anterior cingulate gamma‐aminobutyric acid concentrations and electroconvulsive therapy

“…Our results suggest that increased GABA+ specifically in the anterior cingulate was associated with worsening of effortful cognitive performance. GABA may be contextualized with other ECT‐cognitive biomarkers from structural MRI to help elucidate the mechanism of ECT‐mediated cognitive impairment (Laroy et al., 2019; Oostrom et al., 2018).…”