Fronto‐temporal alterations within the first 200 ms during an attentional task distinguish major depression, non‐clinical participants with depressed mood and healthy controls: A potential biomarker?

Abstract

Attentional impairment in depression is a cardinal feature of depression and has been proposed as a candidate endophenotype for major depressive disorder. Event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by oddball signal detection tasks provide objective markers of selective stimulus processing, and are pertinent endophenotypic markers for depression. While previous studies have sought to determine objective markers for attentional impairment in depression, evidence is inconsistent and may involve heterogeneity in relatively small samples. Here, we brought together oddball ERP recording with source localization of neural correlates of selective attention in outpatients with major depressive disorder (MDD; n = 78) and participants with depressed mood (PDM; n = 127) relative to healthy controls (CTL; n = 116). The key finding was a dimensional exaggeration of the P200 (140-270 ms) to both target (signal) and non-target (noise) stimuli, most pronounced in MDD, followed by PDM, relative to CTL. This exaggeration was coupled with slower and more variable response times, suggesting that neural systems are attempting to compensate for a difficulty in discriminating signal from noise. P200 alterations were localised to limbic (hippocampal), temporal and ventral prefrontal regions, key components of the signal detection network. A subsequent reduction and delay in the P300 was also revealed for MDD indicating that the pronounced lack of discrimination in clinical depression may also lead to impaired stimulus evaluation. This P200 increase in depression could provide a potential mechanism for the attentional impairment frequently observed in depression and consequent alterations in the P300 may differentiate clinically significant depression.

Early processing of emotional faces in a Go/NoGo task: lack of N170 right-hemispheric specialisation in children with major depression

“…Thus, modulations indicating biased processing have been demonstrated for N2 (Deldin et al 2000), P3 (Kayser et al 2000;Cavanagh and Geisler 2006) and slow wave (Deveney and Deldin 2004;Shestyuk et al 2005) components. Indications of abnormal neurophysiological processing in major depression was found as well for early perception stages (first 200 ms after stimulus onset) covered by the P1 (decreased latency; Pierson et al 1996, Yang et al 2011) and P2 (enlarged peak amplitudes to positive stimuli; Kemp et al 2009;Yang et al 2011). These modulations in early stages may represent impaired attention that leads to dysfunctional processing at later stages (Yang et al 2011).…”

Guidelines for the Recording and Evaluation of Pharmaco-EEG Data in Man: The International Pharmaco-EEG Society (IPEG)

“…In addition there is an increasing interest in the use of ERP biomarkers for characterisation of, for example, the cognitive disturbances in schizophrenia [124] or clinical depression [125]. …”

Physiological Correlates of Bipolar Spectrum Disorders and their Treatment

“…ERP components, such as the commonly reported P300, provide an opportunity to determine whether early information-processing is impaired in patient samples (see Degabriele and Lagopoulos 2009;Donchin and Coles 1988;Kemp et al 2009). In studies with bipolar patients in no specific phase, results show ERP (Hall et al 2007;Muir et al 1991;O'Donnell et al 2004;Souza et al 1995) and accentuation of the early processing of positive stimuli (Degabriele et al 2011).…”