Hippocampal White Matter Anisotropy and Treatment Response of Middle-Aged Major Depression: A Diffusion Tensor Imaging Study

Objective: To examine the while matter micro structural changes of hippocampus in the middle-aged major depression, and hypothesis that the hippocampal neurogenesis during the effective antidepressants can be found by the diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). Methods: Seventy middle-aged depressed patients were enrolled, and twenty-seven patients received open but controlled with SSRIs for 10 weeks. Twenty age, gender, education-matched healthy controls were involved as control group. All the subjects were scanned by DTI, using both whole-brain, voxel-based analysis (VBA) and Regions of interests (ROIs) methods to analyze the data. Results: After treatment, patients made significant improvement in the right inferior frontal lobe, left cingulate gyrus of limbic lobe and the right sub-gyral of occipital, but no significant difference in the hippocampus were found Conclusions: Micro structural white matter changes in the frontal gyrus, temporal and cingulated gyrus are associated with middle-aged depression, no changes were found in the hippocampus.