Original articleSmaller Cingulate Volumes in Unipolar Depressed Patients
Section snippets
Subjects
Thirty-one unipolar patients (24 female, 7 male, aged 18–58 years [mean ± SD, 39.2 ± 11.9 years]) were recruited from the outpatient clinics of the Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, or through advertisements in the local community. All patients met DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for current or past major depressive disorder, as determined by the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (SCID; Spitzer et al 1994). Exclusion criteria were other Axis I psychiatric
Results
The unipolar patients did not differ significantly from the healthy control subjects in terms of age, gender, race, and education (Table 1).
The unipolar patient group had significantly smaller mean cingulate cortex volumes for both anterior and posterior regions, bilaterally, compared with the healthy control group (Table 2).
There were no significant relationships between cingulate volumes and clinical variables (age at onset, length of illness, and HDRS scores) after Bonferroni adjustment.
Discussion
Our findings showed significantly smaller cingulate cortex volumes in unipolar patients compared with healthy control subjects. This is in agreement with previous MRI studies (Ballmaier et al 2004, Botteron et al 2002, Drevets et al 1997). Moreover, postmortem studies in unipolar patients demonstrated neuronal soma size reduction and neuronal density increase in the anterior cingulate (Chana et al 2003, Cotter et al 2001, Ongur et al 1998, Rajkowska et al 1999).
These MRI findings are in line
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2022, Psychiatry Research - NeuroimagingCitation Excerpt :All β coefficients reflect standardized regression weights. Although previous studies that reported reductions in ACC volume in depression compared to controls have generally utilized a diagnosis of MDD (Ballmaier et al., 2004; Botteron et al., 2002; Caetano et al., 2006; Coryell et al., 2005; Drevets et al., 1997; Hastings et al., 2004; Lavretsky et al., 2007) or, in the case of the ENIGMA studies, the Beck Depression Inventory or Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (Han et al., 2020), our study indicates that there is a significant relationship between severity of self-reported depressive symptoms and right ACC size in a large sample that includes individuals with a broad range of depressive symptomatology. Thus, by using a different design and larger sample size, the current study complements the findings of prior reports and suggests that a negative association between ACC volume and depressive symptoms can be observed even in individuals who are not formally diagnosed with MDD but who, nevertheless, report depressive symptoms.