A recent imaging study led by a scientist at the University of Texas at Dallas has identified the first risk factors related to children’s temperament and a neural process that could predict whether an individual may develop depression and anxiety in adolescence and ‘early adulthood.
The study, published Oct. 26 in JAMA Psychiatry, followed a cohort of 165 individuals from 4 months of age, between 1989 and 1993, to age 26.
Dr. Alva Tang, assistant professor of psychology in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences and corresponding author of the study, found that people who are more inhibited in early childhood and who also do not respond normally to potential rewards as teenagers they are vulnerable to developing depression later in life, rather than anxiety.
“The findings highlight different mechanisms in the brain and link them to who is at greater risk of developing different mental health problems,” said Tang, who conducted the research at the University of Maryland, College Park, before joining at UT Dallas in August. “These results could inform the development of prevention-oriented treatments tailored to the individual.”
When babies are exposed to new objects, people or situations, some react positively and approach them without fear, while others respond with wariness or avoidance. This differentiation defines uninhibited behavior versus inhibited behavior.
We know that inhibited children are more likely to develop anxiety disorders later in life, especially social anxiety, which starts from childhood to adolescence. Less is known about depression, which generally has a later onset, in young adulthood. But we know that people who have had an anxiety disorder are 50% to 60% more likely to develop depression later in life, so inhibited children should also be at higher risk for depression “.
Dr. Alva Tang, Assistant Professor of Psychology, School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences
Tang’s research is unique in its characterization of subjects’ early temperamental risks and the long time period over which they were studied.
“To show any relationship with increased depressive symptoms over time, we need to follow subjects for decades because full-blown syndromes don’t usually appear until young adulthood,” he said.
As young children, subjects were classified as either inhibited or disinhibited. As teenagers, they underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while completing a task to measure their brain’s reaction to anticipating rewards -; in this case, trying to make money.
“We looked at the ventral striatum, a well-studied brain region in understanding depression in adults, to see if it is linked to maladaptive processing in the brain’s reward centers,” Tang said.
Some study participants showed a strong response in this brain region in reaction to potential monetary rewards.
The researchers found that the association between inhibition between 14 and 24 months of age and worsening depressive symptoms between 15 and 26 years of age was only present among those who also showed blunted activity in the striatum ventral as a teenager. There was no similar association with anxiety.
“We found that behavioral inhibition was related to worsening depressive symptoms in adulthood. This supports the claim that this temperament shows a stronger relationship with the development of anxiety in adolescence, but in adulthood is more strongly linked to depression. However, not all inhibited children develop anxiety or depression,” Tang said. “It was particularly the inhibited children who showed stronger striatal activity who were more likely to become more depressed in young adulthood.”
Tang said his past research has linked anxiety to the neural networks and processes that serve attention and executive functions, while the current work highlights reward and motivation centers in the brain that are linked to depression.
“This study is novel because it can separate out different types of brain correlates for these different conditions,” he said.
There are already interventions for socially anxious and behaviorally inhibited children that improve social and cognitive skills, Tang said. Additional interventions for these children could target motivational deficits, such as helping them learn to actively create conditions where they can engage socially with their peers and seek out positive experiences.
“In turn, this could reduce the likelihood of developing depression that stems from being socially disengaged or missing out on opportunities for positive experiences,” he said.
He said future studies could examine the effectiveness of programs that target maladaptive reward processing among anxious youth in reducing the risks of later depression.
Anxiety and depression are complex conditions that could be caused by a multitude of factors -; genetic, environmental and others, Tang said.
“Here, we show strong evidence that both early temperamental risk factors and maladaptive neurocognitive processing of rewards are involved in the development of depression.”
Other authors of the paper include researchers from the Intramural Research Program at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, as well as scientists from Pennsylvania State University, University College London, the University of California, Davis, and the University of Maryland , College Park. .
Source:
University of Texas at Dallas
Journal reference:
Tang, A. et al. (2022) Striatal activity to reward anticipation as a moderator of the association between early behavioral inhibition and changes in anxiety and depressive symptoms from adolescence to adulthood. JAMA Psychiatry. doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2022.3483.