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. 2018 Aug;26(8):874-883.
doi: 10.1016/j.jagp.2018.04.004. Epub 2018 Apr 23.

Resilience and White Matter Integrity in Geriatric Depression

Roza M Vlasova  1 , Prabha Siddarth  1 , Beatrix Krause  1 , Amber M Leaver  2 , Kelsey T Laird  1 , Natalie St Cyr  1 , Katherine L Narr  2 , Helen Lavretsky  3
Affiliations

Resilience and White Matter Integrity in Geriatric Depression

Roza M Vlasova et al. Am J Geriatr Psychiatry. 2018 Aug.

Abstract

Objective: Greater psychological resilience may protect against developing depression in a growing geriatric population. Identifying the neural correlates of resilience in geriatric depression could provide neurobiologic targets to inform clinical interventions. However, most prior neuroimaging studies have only considered the presence or absence of resilience and have not addressed the multifactorial nature of resilience. The current study aimed to establish the neural correlates of four factors of resilience in the depressed elderly.

Methods: White matter integrity was assessed using diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging data collected from 70 older adults with major depressive disorder. We used four resilience factors previously derived in an exploratory factor analysis of the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale in a large sample of depressed older adults: 1, grit; 2, active coping self-efficacy; 3, accommodative coping self-efficacy; and 4, spirituality.

Results: The resilience factor "grit" was positively associated with fractional anisotropy in the callosal region connecting prefrontal cortex and fractional anisotropy in cingulum fibers; however, the latter did not survive correction for multiple comparisons.

Conclusion: Structural integrity of major white matter pathways implicated in cognitive control and emotion regulation (i.e., connecting prefrontal cortex) was positively associated with the resilience factor "grit" in our sample of older adults with depression. Prospective studies are needed to determine the utility of the structural integrity of these pathways as a biomarker in predicting risk for depression and treatment response.

Keywords: Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale; DTI; MRI; White matter; geriatric depression; grit; major depressive disorder.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of interest: Dr. Lavretsky received research support from Allergan/ Forest Laboratories. The remaining authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Results of TBSS analysis: in red the regions of significant positive association between Grit and FA (p< 0.05, TFCE-corrected; see Table 2 for statistical details). Significant voxels are overlaid on the group mean white matter skeleton (green) and the FA MNI template (Montreal Neurological Institute).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Scatterplots with GLM fits demonstrating associations between Grit and FA in ROIs (statistics are presented in Table 3). CB tract ROI is shown in blue and GCC tract ROI is shown in red. Values for left and right CB were averaged for scatterplot. Effects of age, gender and protocol type were regressed out.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Comment in

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