What causes depression? Chinese and British researchers find links in the brain
Researchers say results could open up new treatment options for poor sleep and lead to a better understanding of depression
Scientists from China and Britain have discovered links in the brain between depression and sleep problems, according to a study published in an American medical journal this week.
Their findings could pave the way for new treatments for depression and insomnia, the researchers said on Friday.
“The relationship between depression and sleep has been observed for more than a century but until this study, scientists and psychiatrists knew little about how they were related,” said Feng Jianfeng, one of the study’s lead researchers and a computational neuroscience professor at the University of Warwick in Britain.
The data-driven study, by researchers at Warwick and Fudan University in Shanghai, was published in JAMA Psychiatry on Wednesday and involved analysis of data from around 10,000 people at international brain image databases, including the US Human Connectome Project and UK Biobank.
It built on work at Fudan University in 2016 by a team led by postdoctoral fellow Cheng Wei.
The team found that a part of the brain called the lateral orbitofrontal cortex, which is in charge of punishment, could make people more sensitive to negative emotions when it was overactive.
Then this year researchers from Fudan and Warwick mined brain image data of 1,017 people from the US Human Connectome Project, and compared the results with a larger data set from UK Biobank.
