United States: Alzheimer’s disease which mostly affects a part of the brain that can cause depression, especially in the early stages. Dr. Marc Gordon, an expert who wasn’t part of the study, explains that it’s not just depression causing Alzheimer’s, but rather the disease itself leading to depression. So, if someone has Alzheimer’s, they might feel sad or down because of the changes in their brain.
He’s chief of the neurology a the Northwell Zucker Hillside Hospital in the Great Neck N.Y.
Research Insights
As the Boston researchers point out “neuropsychiatric symptoms which are particularly depression are really very common in the Alzheimer’s disease.
But the exact links between depression and the Alzheimer’s have been unclear.
As reported by HealthDay, In the new study, Munro and colleagues followed rates of depressive symptoms at baseline, one and two years among 154 participants enrolled in the ongoing, and large-scale Harvard Aging Brain Study.
Study Findings
These were all cognitively normal at the time they entered the study and data were accrued from 2010 to 2022. That data encompassed PET scans performed on the patients’ brain every two to three years for an average of 8.7 years per patient.
Those scans aimed at detecting the deposition of amyloid protein plaques in the brain tissues which are well established in Alzheimer’s disease.
If participants enrolled in the study were experiencing mild depressive symptoms or none, Munro’s group found that “[a]s depressive symptoms worsened, the participants had greater amyloid deposition in brain areas related to affect regulation.”
They observe that this relationship between depression and the amyloid accumulation existed regardless the emergence or the absence of memory or cognition issues.
Expert Opinions
Gordon says that new data shall aid in specifying certain misconceptions relating to depression in the case of Alzheimer’s disease.
‘I think in the past this may have been misconstrued sometimes what was called pseudo depression – that people who had cognitive impairments appeared to have symptoms might mimic depression,’ he explained. “But I think it is clear that depression can mark the onset of the disease and that itself may be early of the disease.”
Implications
In other words, people are not necessarily getting depressed because they have mental problems related to Alzheimer’s— their depression belongs to the variety associated with similar amyloid plaques which are indicative of Alzheimer’s.
This is how Gordon summed up the given paper: “I believe that this paper shows that perhaps what is actually in the neuropathology in some parts of the brain leading to disease is what leads to relatively early presentation of depressive symptoms, separate from cognitive symptoms.”
Such knowledge, as Munro’s team opined, could point to depression as a possible symptom of Alzheimer’s in people at risk – something that emerges earlier than the.