%0 Journal Article
%T Functional anomalies in healthy individuals with a first degree family history of major depressive disorder
%A Francesco Amico
%A Angela Carballedo
%A Danuta Lisiecka
%A Andrew J Fagan
%A Gerard Boyle
%A Thomas Frodl
%J Biology of Mood & Anxiety Disorders
%D 2012
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/2045-5380-2-1
%X A cohort of 38 subjects, of which 14 were patients with acute MDD and 24 were healthy controls (HC), were recruited and compared. The HC group included 10 healthy participants with a first degree family history of depression (FHP) and 14 volunteers with no family history of any psychiatric disease (FHN). Blood oxygen level dependence signals were acquired from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during performance in a dot-probe task using fearful and neutral stimuli. Reaction times and the number of errors were also obtained.Although MDD patients and HC showed no behavioral difference, the MDD group exhibited smaller activation in the left middle cingulum. The MDD group also showed smaller activation in the left insula when compared to the HC group or the FHN group. Finally, FHP participants exhibited higher activation in the right Heschl's gyrus compared to FHN participants.The present study shows that family risk for MDD is associated with increased activation in the Heschl's gyrus. Our results also suggest that acute MDD is linked to reduced activation in the insula and anterior cingulate cortex during processing of subliminal, not recognizable, masked fearful stimuli. Further research should confirm these results in a larger cohort of participants.Most conceptions of the relationship between mood and emotions suggest that moods may potentiate matching emotional reactions (for example, irritable mood facilitates angry reactions [1]). Depressed individuals show more attention towards negative, anxiogenic stimuli [2] which has also been found to be a risk factor for developing major depressive disorder (MDD) [3]. Importantly, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have demonstrated activation anomalies in both MDD patients and in patients at risk for depression during presentation of fearful images [4,5].Interestingly, similar results have been found in healthy individuals with family history of depression (FHP) when compared to healthy indi
%U http://www.biolmoodanxietydisord.com/content/2/1/1