Interaction of developmental factors and ordinary stressful life events on brain structure in adults

Association between stressful life events and grey matter volume in the medial prefrontal cortex: A 2‐year longitudinal study

“…Two cross‐sectional studies have found associations between the number of SLEs in the previous 12 months or the impact of SLEs on life in the previous 6 months with GMV in the mPFC, mOFC, and insula (Ansell et al, 2012 ; Ringwald et al, 2021 ). In our study, the number of SLEs was highly correlated with the impact SLEs had on life.…”

“…For our region of interest‐based approach, we applied a predefined mask consisting of a total of 19,217 voxels. Based on the literature where well‐powered cross‐sectional studies found correlations between recent SLEs in adulthood and GMV in the mPFC, mOFC, and insula were found (Ansell et al, 2012 ; Ringwald et al, 2021 ), this mask included the following areas bilaterally as defined in the Neuromorphometrics Atlas (Neuromorphometrics, Inc., Somerville, MA, USA): anterior and posterior insula, gyrus rectus, medial frontal cortex, medial orbital gyrus, and superior frontal gyrus medial segment. This was done to examine whether cross‐sectional associations found in the literature arise because SLEs reduce GMV in these areas or due to other reasons.…”

“…Studies in larger samples ( N > 100) found negative correlations between the number of recent SLEs in adulthood and grey matter volume (GMV) in the mPFC and insula (Ansell et al, 2012 ). Further, negative correlations between the subjective impact recent SLEs and GMV in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) were found (Ringwald et al, 2021 ). However, due to the cross‐sectional design of these studies, they cannot disentangle cause and effect.…”

“…Healthy subjects, as opposed to patients with mental disorders, have the advantage of being free of potentially confounding factors associated with SLEs, such as treatment or illness per se. We expected a negative correlation between SLEs and GMV changes in the insula, mOFC and mPFC because well-powered cross-sectional studies found correlations in these areas (Ansell et al, 2012;Ringwald et al, 2021). Furthermore, we hypothesized that ACEs (i.e., diathesis) would moderate this association, such that SLEs would have a stronger impact on GMV if a subject had experienced more ACEs.…”

Reduced hippocampal gray matter volume is a common feature of patients with major depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia spectrum disorders

“…The authors found that almost 88% of GMV reductions overlapped in all three diagnostic groups, including regions in the temporal pole, orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), insula, hippocampus, cingulate and angular gyri. However, this study only included adolescents and young adults (aged [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30], not matched for age and sex [16].…”