Sarah Ordaz, Ph.D.

Fellow in Child & Adolescent Depression

Project Details

PROJECT TITLE

Neural Functional Connectivity in Adolescent Depression: Mediating the Effects of Parental Warmth on Clinical Course

PROJECT SUMMARY

Parental warmth has been shown to facilitate recovery from depression in adolescents; however, the neural mechanisms underlying this association are not known. Studies of healthy adolescents suggest that high levels of parental warmth lead to less sadness, melancholy, and irritability by promoting adaptive patterns of neural activation in regions implicated in processing salient stimuli, ruminating, and regulating emotions. In this investigation, we will examine in depressed adolescents whether parental warmth promotes faster recovery from depression by promoting adaptive patterns of connectivity in salience processing, rumination, and executive control neural networks. Our focus on a network-based metric rather than on activity in individual structures will yield a more integrated picture of neural functioning in adolescent depression.

We will diagnose and assess depressive symptoms and maternal warmth in 40 female adolescents, ages 13 to 16, and their mothers. Adolescents will also complete a neuroimaging scan during which we will assess connectivity while resting and while regulating their responses to emotion-eliciting stimuli. Adolescents will then rate their depressive symptoms over each of the next six months so we can estimate longitudinal growth curves to yield individualized rates of symptom change. We will also obtain clinician assessments of depressive symptoms at the start and end of the study. Results will elucidate the impact of parental warmth on patterns of brain function and clinical outcome in depressed adolescents, will provide biologically-based evidence to guide the development of optimal treatments for adolescent depression, and will identify specific neural markers to monitor the efficacy of these interventions.

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