Functional Neuroimaging of Major Depressive Disorder: A Meta-Analysis and New Integration of Baseline Activation and Neural Response Data

By J. Hamilton, Amit Etkin, Daniella J. Furman, M. Lemus, Rebecca F. Johnson, I. Gotlib. American Journal of Psychiatry, 2012

825 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Objective: Functional neuroimaging investigations of major depressive disorder can advance both the neural theory and treatment of this debilitating illness. Inconsistency of neuroimaging findings and the use of region-of-interest approaches have hindered the development of a comprehensive, empirically informed neural model of major depression. In this context, the authors sought to identify reliable anomalies in baseline neural activity and neural response to affective stimuli in major depressive disorder. Method: The authors applied voxel-wise, whole-brain meta-analysis to neuroimaging investigations comparing depressed to healthy comparison groups with respect to baseline neural activity or neural response to positively and/or negatively valenced stimuli. Results: Relative to healthy subjects, those with major depression had reliably higher baseline activity, bilaterally, in the pulvinar nucleus. The analysis of neural response studies using negative stimuli showed greater response in the amygdala, insula, and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and lower response in the dorsal striatum and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in individuals with major depressive disorder than in healthy subjects. Conclusions: The meta-analytic results support an elegant and neuroanatomically viable model of the salience of negative information in major depressive disorder. In this proposed model, high baseline pulvinar activity in depression first potentiates responding of the brain’s salience network to negative information; next, and owing potentially to low striatal dopamine levels in depression, this viscerally charged information fails to propagate up the cortical-striatal-pallidal-thalamic circuit to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex for contextual processing and reappraisal.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Pharmacology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6b6dda09d0e6a4057395cb033d875524d5b0510e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Depressive Rumination, the Default-Mode Network, and the Dark Matter of Clinical Neuroscience (2015, methodology): “See previous meta-analyses (37, 39) for more details about this approach.”
The wandering brain: Meta-analysis of functional neuroimaging studies of mind-wandering and related spontaneous thought processes (2015, neutral): “Yet one of these groups'meta-analysis (Hamilton et al., 2012) has shown that several regions beyond the DMN show abnormal activity in depression, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, insula, and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (note that the two latter regions are consistently recruited…”
Neuroimaging cognitive reappraisal in clinical populations to define neural targets for enhancing emotion regulation. A systematic review (2016, background): “…responses, as has been observed during emotion appraisal in depressed patients (Chen et al., 2011; Delvecchio et al., 2012; Groenewold et al., 2013; Hamilton et al., 2012); alternatively it could also be attributed to the reduced modulatory capacity of regulatory networks during cognitive…”