Family history of depression is associated with altered task-dependent connectivity between the cerebellum and ventral medial prefrontal cortex

First published: March 5, 2021 https://doi.org/10.1002/da.23143

Commentary

This study included 279 participants from the Human Connectome Project and divided them into three groups.

・71 people with a lifetime history of MDD.

・103 people with a family history of MDD (FH)

・105 healthy individuals.

We evaluated social cognition and reward processing task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging data from these individuals, found regions of the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) that responded to both tasks independently of the group, and investigated whether the vmPFC showed changes in functional connectivity between the groups. To analyze this, we used the vmPFC as the seed region and conducted a psychophysiological interaction analysis.

The results showed that FH was associated with increased sadness scores and MDD was associated with increased sadness and MDD symptoms. The FH group was also found to have increased vmPFC functional connectivity within the nucleus accumbens, left dorsolateral PFC, and cerebellar subregions on a social cognitive task compared to HC.

These findings suggest that abnormal neural mechanisms in individuals at familial risk for MDD may underlie their vulnerability to changes in social cognition.