Most of us have had moments when we're feeling down—maybe we can't stop thinking about our worst mistakes, or our most embarrassing memories—but for some, these poor mood states can be relentless and even debilitating. Now, new research from UC San Francisco has identified a common pattern of brain activity that may be behind those feelings of low mood, particularly in people who have a tendency towards anxiety. The newly discovered network is a significant advance in research on the neurobiology of mood, and could serve as a biomarker to help scientists developing new therapies to help people with mood disorders such as depression.
Most human brain research on mood disorders has relied on studies in which participants lie in an fMRI scanner and look at upsetting images or listen to sad stories. These studies have helped scientists identify brain areas associated with emotion in healthy and depressed individuals, but they don't reveal much about the natural mood fluctuations that people experience over the course of a day or provide insight into the actual mechanisms of brain activity underlying mood.
Newly published research by UCSF Health neurosurgeon and neuroscientist Edward Chang, MD, and psychiatrist and neuroscientist Vikaas Sohal, MD, Ph.D.—both members of the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences and the recently launched UCSF Dolby Family Center for Mood Disorders—has begun to fill these gaps in our understanding of the neuroscience of mood by continuously recording brain activity for a week or more in human volunteers and linking their day-to-day mood swings to specific patterns of brain activity.
[For more on this study by the University of California, San Francisco, go to https://medicalxpress.com/news...d-mood-unveiled.html]
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