Gray Matter Volume Abnormalities in Depressive Patients With and Without Anxiety Disorders

Abstract

Comorbidity with anxiety disorder is a relatively common occurrence in major depressive disorder. However, the unique and shared neuroanatomical characteristics of depression and anxiety disorders have not been fully identified. The aim of this study was to identify gray matter abnormalities and their clinical correlates in depressive patients with and without anxiety disorders.We applied voxel-based morphometry and region-of-interest analyses of gray matter volume (GMV) in normal controls (NC group, n = 28), depressive patients without anxiety disorder (DP group, n = 18), and depressive patients with anxiety disorder (DPA group, n = 20). The correlations between regional GMV and clinical data were analyzed.The DP group showed decreased GMV in the left insula (INS) and left triangular part of the inferior frontal gyrus when compared to the NC group. The DPA group showed greater GMV in the midbrain, medial prefrontal cortex, and primary motor/somatosensory cortex when compared to the NC group. Moreover, the DPA group showed greater GMV than the DP group in the frontal, INS, and temporal lobes. Most gray matter anomalies were significantly correlated with depression severity or anxiety symptoms. These correlations were categorized into 4 trend models, of which 3 trend models (ie, Models I, II, and IV) revealed the direction of the correlation between regional GMV and depression severity to be the opposite of that between regional GMV and anxiety symptoms. Importantly, the left INS showed a trend Model I, which might be critically important for distinguishing depressive patients with and without anxiety disorder.Our findings of gray matter abnormalities, their correlations with clinical data, and the trend models showing opposite direction may reflect disorder-specific symptom characteristics and help explain the neurobiological differences between depression and anxiety disorder.

Increased Cerebellar-Default-Mode-Network Connectivity in Drug-Naive Major Depressive Disorder at Rest

“…In addition, first-episode, drug-naive patients were reported to have increased cortical thickness in the MPFC. 47 , 52 In line with these studies, the ventral MPFC shows increased FC with the cerebellar seed in the present study. Furthermore, increased FC in the MPFC was reported to have positive correlation with rumination scores.…”

Discriminative analysis of schizophrenia using support vector machine and recursive feature elimination on structural MRI images

“…[29,30,45] Briefly, all T1-weighted MRI data processing was performed using the SPM8 software package (http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm; Institute of Neurology, University College London, UK). First, each T1-weighted MRI was segmented into 3 tissue maps, including GM, WM, and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) by using the new segmentation algorithm from SPM8.…”

Brainstem volume mediates seasonal variation in depressive symptoms: A cross sectional study in the UK Biobank cohort

“…The biological mechanisms behind changes in brainstem volumes in mood disorders are still unclear. Previous studies [22][23][24] that have shown that individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) showed increased whole brainstem and midbrain volumes compared to healthy controls. In addition, previous studies 32 have shown that the echogenicity of the brainstem raphe nuclei is altered in patients with unipolar depressive disorders (UDD) www.nature.com/scientificreports www.nature.com/scientificreports/ compared to healthy controls.…”