Treatment response of hippocampal neural plasticity in depression:a diffusion tensor imaging study

Abstract

Objective To examine the white matter micro structural changes of hippocampus in the mid-die-aged major depression, and hypothesis that the hippocampal neurogenesis during the effective antidepressants can be found by diffusion tensor imaging(DTI) technology. Methods Middle-aged patients with major depression were enrolled, twenty patients received open but controlled with SSRIs for 10 weeks,twenty age, gender, education-matched healthy controls were involved as control group. All the subjects were scanned by DTI,using both whole-brain,voxel-based analysis(VBA) and Regions of interests (ROIs) methods to analyze the data. Results The VBA analysis found the post treatment patients made significant improvement in the fight inferior frontal lobe, left cingulate gyms of iimbic lobe and the right sub-gyral of occipital,but no significant difference in the hippocampus were found between any groups (all P 20). For the hippocampal relative FA of ROIs analysis,there were no significant difference between the patients before and after treatment, even no difference between the prior-treatment patients and healthy control,the remitted patients and the healthy controls(P<0.05). Conclusions Micro structural white matter changes in the frontal gyms, temporal and cingulated gyms are associated with mid-die-aged depression,no changes were found in the hippocampus. These findings do not support the hypothesis that the hippocampal neurogenesis can be found by DTI technology. Key words: Depression; Hippocampus; Diffusion tensor imaging