People with a family history of depression have an altered brain anatomy, a new study says, even if they themselves have never experienced clinical depression.
Brain scans showed a 28-percent thinning in the right cortex -- the outer layer of the brain -- in people who had a family history of depression compared with people who did not. "The difference was so great that at first we almost didn't believe it. But we checked and re-checked all of our data, and we looked for all possible alternative explanations, and still the difference was there" [Reuters],
said study coauthor Bradley Peterson. Researchers scanned the brains of 131 individuals ranging in age from 6 to 54, about half of whom came from families with a history of depression. The
team was looking specifically for abnormalities in the brain that could signal a predisposition to depression, rather than changes that may be caused ...
