Depressed Patients Show Abnormal Activation of the Occipital Lobes

A recent study conducted by Chinese investigators integrated cognition tasks and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and designed multiple repeated event-related tasks to study brain functions in depressed patients.

The study’s findings were published May 2013 in the journal Neural Regeneration Research. Using the International Affective Picture System-based event-related tasks, this research investigated brain functional characteristics of major depressive disorder patients exhibiting negative bias brain imaging alterations and cognitive dysfunction, as well as their relationship based on biased quantitative data.

The researchers, from the Hospital of Shanxi Medical University (Taiyuan, China) and the Shanxi Provincial People’s Hospital (Taiyuan, China), moreover reported that their study’s findings, revealed that the number of error responses was calculated to identify bias of emotion recognition between patients with major depressive disorder and normal controls, suggesting that the depressed patients exhibited negative bias towards emotion task stimuli based on quantitative data; the activation of the occipital lobe was attenuated in depressed patients when doing emotion tasks; and lastly, deficits in the occipital lobes may be an initiating factor for depression onset, which results in attention deficit disorder and cognitive dysfunction.

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Hospital of Shanxi Medical University