MRI Analysis of The Prefrontal Cortex in Patients With MDD

  • Author(s) / Creator(s)
  • Severe forms of depression affect 2-5% of the population, ranking as one of the top ten causes of disability (. Discovering the cause of major depressive disorder (MDD) is a challenging task for society.   Most of the structural MRI studies in depression have focused on limbic structures-- particularly the hippocampus, amygdala, and cingulate gyrus (Hajek et al., 2009; Malykhin et al., 2010). However, only a few studies have examined the prefrontal cortex (Steingard et al., 2002; Botteron et al., 2002), where the abnormalities have consistently been reported using functional MRI. In addition, in post- mortem studies the volume reduction, dendrite retraction, and spine loss have been well demonstrated in the subgenual prefrontal cortex (PFC) of the depressed patients (Hajek et al., 2008).   The present study has several goals. The initial goal was to develop a manual PFC parcellation method to separate the PFC into four regions. The second goal was to determine whether these specific prefrontal areas are affected with patients with MDD.

  • Date created
    2010-10-16
  • Subjects / Keywords
  • Type of Item
    Conference/Workshop Poster
  • DOI
    https://doi.org/10.7939/R3697049M
  • License
    Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International