Cortical abnormalities in adults and adolescents with major depression based on brain scans from 20 cohorts worldwide in the ENIGMA Major Depressive Disorder Working Group

By L. Schmaal, D. Hibar, P. Sämann, G. Hall, Bernhard T. Baune, Neda Jahanshad, J. Cheung, T. V. Erp, D. Bos, M. Ikram and 73 more. Molecular Psychiatry, 2016

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The neuro-anatomical substrates of major depressive disorder (MDD) are still not well understood, despite many neuroimaging studies over the past few decades. Here we present the largest ever worldwide study by the ENIGMA (Enhancing Neuro Imaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis) Major Depressive Disorder Working Group on cortical structural alterations in MDD. Structural T1-weighted brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans from 2148 MDD patients and 7957 healthy controls were analysed with harmonized protocols at 20 sites around the world. To detect consistent effects of MDD and its modulators on cortical thickness and surface area estimates derived from MRI, statistical effects from sites were meta-analysed separately for adults and adolescents. Adults with MDD had thinner cortical gray matter than controls in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), anterior and posterior cingulate, insula and temporal lobes (Cohen’s d effect sizes: −0.10 to −0.14). These effects were most pronounced in first episode and adult-onset patients (>21 years). Compared to matched controls, adolescents with MDD had lower total surface area (but no differences in cortical thickness) and regional reductions in frontal regions (medial OFC and superior frontal gyrus) and primary and higher-order visual, somatosensory and motor areas (d: −0.26 to −0.57). The strongest effects were found in recurrent adolescent patients. This highly powered global effort to identify consistent brain abnormalities showed widespread cortical alterations in MDD patients as compared to controls and suggests that MDD may impact brain structure in a highly dynamic way, with different patterns of alterations at different stages of life.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Pharmacology, Psychiatry and Mental health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aa3e94b583ba17c7b757ec38873cbdf683329b37

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Pharmacology

Vince D. Calhoun

In Psychiatry and Mental health

Citations in the corpus

Cortical brain abnormalities in 4474 individuals with schizophrenia and 5098 controls via the ENIGMA consortium (2018, result): “Similar published meta-analyses in bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder, with the same study design and analytical methods, found thinner bilateral frontal, temporal, and parietal lobe cortex in individuals with bipolar disorder with evidence for divergent effects of medication treatments ”
Reduced default mode network functional connectivity in patients with recurrent major depressive disorder (2019, positive): “The ENIGMA-MDD working group found a slight albeit robust reduction in hippocampal volume (4) and cortical thinning in medial orbitofrontal cortex (5).”
Cortical abnormalities in bipolar disorder: an MRI analysis of 6503 individuals from the ENIGMA Bipolar Disorder Working Group (2017, neutral): “41 Image acquisition parameters and software descriptions are given in Supplementary Table S4.”