Brain Scan Predicts Depression Relapse

In a research article in the British Journal of Psychiatry, researchers from Germany reported that they measured the size of a particular brain area in patients with major depression and found that this area was significantly smaller in men who later had a relapse than in those who stayed well. The brain area they measured was, as you might have guessed, the hippocampus. It’s been know for several years that depressed persons tend to have shrinkage of this brain area compared to persons without depression. This study is the first one to show that in men who get well and stay well from depression, the hippocampus is larger and more like that seen in persons without depression problems. You can read about the study here. It’s interesting to note that this was not true of the women in the study. The researchers concluded that “Hippocampal reduction is a gender-specific factor” in the cause of depression.