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Depression happens to the best of us. It’s not something we plan for, neither is it something that is preordained. Most of us tend to encounter periods of time where we fall into a bad mood or feel low, which is often a precursor for depression and anxiety.
While we’ve come to acknowledge and deal with these emotions as part of our daily lives, have you ever wondered what goes on in the brain when these fluctuations emotions take place? Understanding what it looks like is also important to deal with such mood fluctuation more effectively.
farmweek.com
Scientists have identified a common pattern of brain activity behind bad mood, an advance that could help develop new therapies for depression and anxiety.
Most human brain research on mood disorders has relied on studies in which participants lie in a fMRI scanner and look at upsetting images or listen to sad stories.
These studies have helped scientists identify brain areas associated with emotion in healthy and depressed individuals, but they do not reveal much about the natural mood fluctuations that people experience over the course of a day or provide insight into the actual mechanisms of brain activity underlying mood.
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Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco in the US, however, have identified a common pattern of brain activity that may be behind those feelings of low mood, particularly in people who have a tendency towards anxiety.
The communication between two specific regions of the brain, our memory and emotion increases when a person is feeling low, found the researchers.
The researchers found an increase in the communication between the amygdala (a region of the brain involved in processing emotions) and the hippocampus (involved in memory).
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“The idea that memories of negative experiences and negative emotions are closely linked is an old idea in psychiatry, and is at the core of cognitive behavioral therapy (a technique used psychiatrists) by,” said Dr. Vikaas Sohal, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco told Live Science.
For the study published in the journal Cell, researchers continuously recorded brain activity for a week or more in human volunteers and linked their day-to-day mood swings to specific patterns of brain activity.
“We were quite surprised to identify a single signal that almost completely accounted for bouts of depressed mood in such a large set of people. Finding such a powerfully informative biomarker was more than what we’d expected at this stage of the project,” Sohal said.
learning-mind.com
“For many patients, it is very important to know that when they are feeling depressed, it is due to something measurable and concrete within their brain,” said co-senior study author Dr. Sohal. “For some patients, this can provide important validation and remove stigma, empowering them to seek appropriate treatment.”
While it isn’t clear whether it is the increased communication in the brain that is causing the bad mood, it is important to know at what part of the brain the reactions are taking place to treat anxiety and depression better.
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