Depressive disorder patients exhibit negative bias brain imaging changes and cognitive dysfunction

A recent study published in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 8, No. 18, 2013) combined cognition tasks and functional MRI, and designed multiple repeated event-related tasks; additionally, using the International Affective Picture System-based event-related tasks, this study investigated brain functional characteristics of major depressive disorder patients exhibiting, negative bias brain imaging changes and cognitive dysfunction, as well as their relationship based on biased quantitative data.

Results show that (1) the number of error responses was calculated to identify bias of emotion recognition between patients with major depressive disorder and normal controls, suggesting that the depressed patients exhibited negative bias towards emotion task stimuli based on quantitative data; (2) the activation of the occipital lobe was attenuated in depressed patients when doing emotion tasks; (3) Deficits in the occipital lobes may be an initiating factor for depression onset, which results in attention deficit disorder and cognitive dysfunction.