P 156 Correlation of regional brain volume and affective disorders 7T MRI based structural analysis of human hypothalami with anxiety symptoms

Abstract

Objectives Essential features of the hypothalamus play a constitutive role in the depressive symptomatology and the anxiety generating stress response system. The involvement of the structure in the pathophysiology of affective disorders is undisputed. Only a few studies dealt with the association of anxiety symptoms in psychiatric disorders and the hypothalamus volume, tested via a lower resolution MRI ( Goldstein et al., 2007 , Terlevic et al., 2013 , Cheng et al., 2015 ). Yet their results remained contradictory. This substantiated our interest to verify the correlation of the hypothalamus volume and the anxiety score of affective disorder patients, hypothesizing a negative correlation. Method 61 patients, aged 20–62 years and suffering from major depressive or bipolar disorders participated in the study. The method of Schindler et al. (2013) was used to perform the hypothalamus volumetry. The anxiety score was calculated with items from the Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology (IDS) according to the factor analysis of Rush et al. (1996) . Results Kendall’s correlation shows a significant moderate correlation between the left hypothalamus volume and the anxiety score of patients with a medicated major unipolar depression ( τ b = 0.391 , p = 0,019). For patients with unmedicated major depressive or bipolar disorder the effect was not significant. Conclusions To our knowledge, this is the first study exploring a positive correlation of an anxiety score and the hypothalamus-volume, investigated with high-resolution 7T images, in affective disorders. The formerly presumed negative correlation between hypothalamus and anxiety score was refuted. However due to the contradictory state of research we could only put forward a weak hypothesis. In light of these results, future studies would have to review the correlation with an extended sample, an own factor analysis and a more precise anxiety scale.