Archival ReportMood-Linked Responses in Medial Prefrontal Cortex Predict Relapse in Patients with Recurrent Unipolar Depression
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were right-handed adults ranging in age from 21 to 61. Sixteen participants fully remitted from unipolar depression (mean age = 44, SD = 16; 11 female) and 16 healthy control subjects (mean age = 39, SD = 13; 11 female) participated in the study (Table 1 contains further participant information). All remitted patients had a history of three or more past episodes of depression at the time of recruitment (mean number of past episodes = 4.6, SD = 2.4). All remitted patients were
Results
Patient and control groups did not differ on demographic indicators such as gender, age, employment and marital status, or ethnic distribution (Table 1). Patients demonstrated higher depression scores than control subjects at study intake [t(30) = 2.68, p < .05], although all patients were in the normal range (HRSD < 7). Emotional reactivity (ER) was operationalized through the comparison of sad and neutral film viewing periods. Sad films elicited greater reported sadness than neutral films in
Discussion
We employed sad mood provocation to conduct a prospective neuroimaging study of depressive relapse. Expansive mPFC reactivity predicted depressive relapse, encompassing both dorsal and ventral aspects of the mPFC (Figure 2, Panel A). The mPFC prediction of relapse was partially associated with patient ruminative tendencies, but much of mPFC relapse prediction was not accounted for by rumination (Figure 3, Panel A). It may be that mPFC reactivity represents other maladaptive processes during
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