People who have a high family risk of developing depression had less brain matter on the right side of their brains on par with losses seen in Alzheimer’s disease, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
Brain scans showed a 28-percent thinning in the right cortex — the outer layer of the brain — in people who had a family history of depression compared with people who did not.
“The difference was so great that at first we almost didn’t believe it. But we checked and re-checked all of our data, and we looked for all possible alternative explanations, and still the difference was there,” said Dr. Bradley Peterson of Columbia University Medical Center and the New York State Psychiatric Institute.
Initial questions:
- Is it a thinning of the brain, as in continual, or is the condition simply an abnormality?
- Is there a way to reverse the process?
- What other conditions may this indicate?
What bothers me about this story is the very last line:
Peterson said the findings suggest medications used to treat attention problems such as stimulants might be useful in the treatment of depression in some patients.
Why is it always a turn to medication first? Anyway, interesting none the less.