Researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine have uncovered a distinctive pattern of brain activity linked to depression by conducting repeated scans of a small patient group over a year and a half. Their findings, published on September 4 in Nature, demonstrate the potential of an advanced "deep scanning" method to predict susceptibility to depression and other neuropsychiatric disorders, potentially guiding the development of new treatments.

Traditionally, neuroscientists have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study brain activity by measuring blood flow changes. This technique has been crucial for examining brain organization at an individual level. However, brain activity patterns can vary significantly between individuals and even fluctuate over time in the same person, posing challenges for studying episodic conditions like depression.

“Depression is characterized by fluctuating periods of low mood and wellness,” explains Dr. Conor Liston, senior author of the study and professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute at Weill Cornell Medicine. “We needed to understand the mechanisms behind these transitions over time.”

To investigate, the researchers scanned the brains of patients with diagnosed depression, along with a larger group of healthy controls, multiple times over several months. The deep scanning revealed that the salience network—a brain region involved in reward processing and attention—was nearly twice as large in those with depression compared to the controls.

“The increased size of the salience network appears to heighten the risk for depression, showing a significant effect compared to typical fMRI findings,” notes Dr. Liston, who is also a psychiatrist at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

Further analysis, involving hundreds of additional patients with less frequent scans, suggested that individuals with a larger salience network in childhood might be more predisposed to developing depression later in life, as if they were biologically predisposed.

Dr. Charles Lynch, assistant professor of neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medicine and lead author of the study, adds, “The salience network’s involvement in reward processing correlates with depression, given that a key symptom of depression is anhedonia, or the inability to experience pleasure.”

While the researchers caution that these results need further validation before clinical application, the study provides significant support for the deep scanning technique. “Our findings challenge the notion that brain networks are uniform across individuals,” Dr. Lynch says. “We hope to explore how depression treatments affect brain network activity and potentially extend this research to other neuropsychiatric conditions.”

Weill Cornell Medicine values transparency and collaborative innovation, maintaining public disclosures about its research and institutional affiliations. For more information, see the profile for Dr. Conor Liston.