Researchers Find Clues That Depression May Speed Brain Aging

Using a new technique to scan the brains of living people, Yale University scientists found subjects with depression had a lower density of synapses than healthy people the same age, reports the Daily Journal . "We think depression might be accelerating the normal aging," said Yale's Irina Esterlis. Volunteers were injected with a radioactive substance that binds to a protein in the synapses' vesicles, causing them to light up during positron-emission tomography (PET) scans so researchers could visualize how many synapses are in different brain regions. Esterlis said the lower the synaptic density, the more severe depression symptoms were, especially problems with attention and loss of interest in previously pleasurable activities. Esterlis is planning a larger study for the purpose of tracking synaptic density in larger numbers of people as they age, to determine if and how it fluctuates over time in individuals with and without depression.