explanation At the Department of Psychiatry and the Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, we follow a combined structural and functional imaging approach using magnetic resonance imaging (mri) to investigate a unique pool of patients, being either medication-naïve or unmedicated early in the course of depression. Firstly, we assessed state and trait changes of structural integrity of core regions such as amygdala and hippocampus on the one hand and cortical thickness on the other hand. Secondly, we investigated whether functional mri can really support that brain regions such as amygdala specifically mediates cognitive biases for emotional information in depression. Moreover, the patient studies provided us with regions of interests (rois) that seem to be altered in a trait fashion. This information was used in a final step whereby we aimed to understand the effect of genetic variability in common genetic polymorphisms on these rois as a prerequisite for a vulnerability to develop depression.
aim At the end of this session the participant will have an overview of the most important brain regions that play a role in the neurobiology of depression and will be able to dissociate between structural and functional changes related to the disease.