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Medical Video: The depressed brain: sobering and hopeful lessons
Until recently, many experts and neurologists claimed that chronic depression was caused by a change in the brain. But now it is proven that brain damage does not cause depression, but quite the opposite: chronic depression actually causes brain damage.
Symptoms of chronic depression can continue to persist after you recover
Common symptoms of depression include mood swings, which are also accompanied by cognitive function barriers - difficult to remember, difficult to make decisions, plan, set priorities, and take action. Brain imaging studies using MRI scanning show that these common depressive symptoms are associated with abnormalities in certain regions of the brain, including the hippocampus (center of memory), anterior cingulate (area of conflict resolution of the brain), and prefrontal cortex (which is involved with planning and executing activities).
Depression is considered a chronic stress related disease. People with chronic depression are known to often have smaller hippocampus sizes than healthy people. Hippocampus is an area of the brain that has an important role in the formation of new memory by processing memories to be stored long-term.
Now a study published in the journal Moleculum Psychiatry has provided strong evidence that recurrent chronic depression actually shrinks the hippocampus causing a loss of emotional and behavioral functions. So, someone who is depressed still has difficulty remembering and concentrating even after recovering from his illness. Nearly 20 percent of chronic depressed patients can never recover fully.
How does depression affect the brain?
Depression increases cortisol production in the brain. Cortisol is a stress hormone that is toxic to cells in the hippocampus. Long-term exposure to cortisol is suspected to cause shrinkage in the size of the hippocampus, which eventually causes memory problems, aka difficulty remembering.
But when the hippocampus shrinks, it's not just a matter of remembering a Facebook password. You also change all kinds of other behaviors related to your memory. Therefore, shrinking the hippocampus is also associated with loss of normal daily function.
This is because the hippocampus is also connected to many brain regions that regulate how we feel and respond to stress. The hippocampus is connected to the amygdala which controls our experience of fear. In people with chronic depression, the amygdala actually enlarges and is more active as a result of exposure to excess cortisol in the long term.
Enlarged and hyperactive amygdala, combined with other abnormal activities in the brain, can cause sleep disturbances and activity patterns. This also causes the body to release a number of hormones and other chemicals, and cause other depression complications.
How to treat depression symptoms as early as possible to prevent brain damage?
According to Professor Poul Videbech, a psychiatry specialist at the Center for Psychiatric Research at Aarhus University Hospital, depression produces shrinkage of the hippocampus to ten percent which leaves traces in the brain, citing Nordic Science. Videbech continued, in some cases, this reduction could continue when the depression was over.
The good news, the hippocampus is the relative brain region, where conditions are very possible to grow new nerves. This is why doctors and other health experts constantly emphasize the importance of treating depressive symptoms as early as possible. Treatment of depression is related to the normalization of mood, behavior, and many other brain disorders associated with depression.
Increased cortisol levels due to depression are known to inhibit the formation of new nerves, but depression drugs and other depression therapies can counteract these negative effects. Antidepressants work to reverse the shrinking of the hippocampus and treat the mood and memory problems it causes, by changing the pattern of brain activity and balancing the amount of cortisol and other chemicals in the brain. This all then promotes the growth of new brain cells. Balancing the levels of chemicals in the body can also help alleviate symptoms of chronic depression.
It is important to note that new nerve growth in the hippocampus takes up to six weeks to complete completely; and this at the same time is needed for the efficacy of some monoaminergic antidepressant drugs (eg SSRIs) so that they can have optimal impact.
