Philadelphia, March 23, 2022 – Children of mothers with clinical depression are at three times greater risk to develop depression themselves than are their low-risk peers. Researchers are working to understand the neural underpinnings of the risk, and some studies have shown altered brain processing of reward in at-risk children as young as 6. An outstanding question remains as to whether children with a maternal history of depression have a biological predisposition to blunted neural reward responding or whether it depends more on social factors. Now, new work finds those dampened responses depended on maternal feedback, suggesting the latter.
The study appears in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, published by Elsevier.
Researchers have long observed changes in brain activity associated with depression in adults, particularly in a brain area called the ventral striatum (VS), which is associated with motivation, pleasure, and goal-directed behaviors. Similarly, several studies have shown striatal responses to rewarding experiences are blunted in adolescent children of depressed parents, which predicts later development of depression. However, more recent work shows that these brain changes can emerge long before the teenage years, when the risk for depression typically increases.
For the current study, lead author Judith Morgan, PhD, at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, recruited 49…
