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Depression is the leading chronic condition and the fourth leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Still, the mechanisms underlying the development of depression are not well understood. The EU-funded project VULDE (Biomarkers and underlying mechanisms of vulerability to depression) aimed to enrich the longitudinal data from the European Longitudinal Study of Pregnancy and Childhood (ELSPAC) with neuroimaging data from young adulthood and revealed the impact of prenatal stress on mood dysregulation and grey matter volume.
Depression is the leading chronic condition and the fourth leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Still, the mechanisms underlying the development of depression are not well understood. The EU-funded project VULDE (Biomarkers and underlying mechanisms of vulerability to depression) aimed to enrich the longitudinal data from the European Longitudinal Study of Pregnancy and Childhood (ELSPAC) with neuroimaging data from young adulthood and revealed the impact of prenatal stress on mood dysregulation and grey matter volume.
„We showed that young adults (age 23-24) whose mothers experienced more stressful life events during pregnancy have smaller gray matter volume. This finding was significant at the level of the whole brain and particularly in regions known as hypometabolic in depressed patients vs. healthy controls. Experience of prenatal stress also predicted greater anxiety, fatigue and anger in these young adults.“ explains Dr. Klára Marečková, the Marie Curie Fellow at the Brain and Mind Research Programme at CEITEC MU. „Overall, our results point to the importance and long lasting effects of prenatal programming and suggest that offspring of mothers who went through substantial stress during pregnancy might benefit from early intervention that would reduce the odds of mental illness in later life.“ adds Marečková.
Thanks to the project VULDE, we were also able to develop a collaboration with Harvard Medical School and our joint papers on the impact of dysphoric mood and sex on brain function across different psychiatric diagnoses were recently published in Human Brain Mapping (2016) and Journal of Affective Disorders (2017).
Project VULDE received funding from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-IEF-2013) under the REA grant agreement number 629541.