Elsevier

Biological Psychiatry

Volume 64, Issue 6, 15 September 2008, Pages 541-544
Biological Psychiatry

Brief Report
Regional Gray Matter Changes Are Associated with Cognitive Deficits in Remitted Geriatric Depression: An Optimized Voxel-Based Morphometry Study

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2008.04.032Get rights and content

Background

We aimed to investigate structural abnormalities in first-episode remitted geriatric depression (RGD) with optimized voxel-based morphometry (VBM) in closely matched patients and healthy control subjects and examine the relationship of performances on neuropsychological tests with regional gray matter volumes.

Methods

Nineteen subjects with first-episode RGD and 16 well-matched healthy control subjects were recruited for this study, and neuropsychological tests and magnetic resonance imaging were conducted on the subjects. The differences in regional gray matter volume were determined between these two groups by optimized VBM.

Results

The volumes of right superior frontal cortex, left postcentral cortex, and right middle temporal gyrus were significantly smaller in patients with RGD relative to healthy control subjects. However, patients with RGD had larger left cingulate gyrus volume compared with healthy control subjects. There was a significant negative correlation between left cingulate gyrus volume and Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test delayed recall raw score in patients with RGD.

Conclusion

These results reveal that RGD is associated with gray matter changes of certain brain regions hypothesized to influence cognition and might thus be involved in the psychopathology and pathophysiology of cognitive impairment in RGD.

Section snippets

Subjects

A total of 19 patients (9 men and 10 women; average age 67.1 ± 7.2 years) were recruited from the Affiliated Brain Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, China, from January 2007 to June 2007. All patients were interviewed in a semi-structured interview included in the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis I Disorders (SCID-I), Clinician Version (10), by two trained and senior psychiatrists (Y.Y. and J.Y.). They met the following inclusion criteria: 1) met the major depressive disorder

Results

No significant differences in age, gender distribution, years of education, scores for HDRS, MMSE, Clock drawing test, and Digit span test were observed between the RGD patients and healthy control subjects (all p > .05). However, the RGD patients performed significantly worse in the delayed recall of RAVLT, Trail Making Test A and B (sec) when compared with the control group (p < .001, p < .05, and p < .05, respectively) (Table 1).

Optimized VBM analyses showed that RGD subjects had

Discussion

The major finding of the present study is that the patients with RGD have significantly smaller volumes of right superior frontal gyrus, left postcentral gyrus, and right middle temporal gyrus and larger volume in left cingulate gyrus than age-matched healthy subjects.

Our findings of smaller regional gray matter volumes were consistent with previously studies of LLD (3, 11). Decreased gray matter in these areas might suggest neuronal apoptosis or a loss of neuropil (12). Interestingly, the grey

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Copyright © 2008 Society of Biological Psychiatry. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.