Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh looked at people with neuropsychiatric symptoms for following concussion and found that a link exists between white matter and concussion-related depression.
Saaed Fakhran a radiology professor at Pitt who led the research, said Alzheimer's and brain degeneration tend to get more attention.
“But in terms of just pure numbers, the number of people affected by depression and anxiety is just way, way more than anything else. And unlike brain degeneration and Alzheimer's, this is something that happens right away,” he said.
Fakran presented his findings this week at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.
They looked at a group of patients who had depression and anxiety following their injury to see if they could identify specific areas in the brain that were injured.
“When we looked at patients with depression following concussion we found three specific areas that those patients had injury in when you compared them to just other concussion patients who didn’t have depression. And what was really interesting for us was those three areas are also three areas that are injured in just people who are depressed without any history of a concussion,” he said.
Fakran says that tells us that perhaps the treatment should be focused on treating the depression and less on concussion.
White matter is what connects different regions of the brain and what allows them to communicate with each other.
Researchers examined MRI scans in 74 concussion patients using a technique called diffusion tensor imaging that allows them to visualize the white matter and look for places where the white matter is injured.
There were different results when they looked at patients with anxiety. People without clinical anxiety, when they get nervous, they’ll have areas of abnormalities in the areas of higher processing in the brain.
Patients post-concussion with anxiety, when they looked at them, all their areas of abnormality were more primitive areas.
“So that to me tells me, woah, this is a completely different injury than your normal anxiety, OCD patient and we need to approach these patients totally different, look at them totally differently and kind of focus our treatment – don’t treat them like we would treat normal anxiety patients,” said Fakran.
