Event
Probing and Rescuing Dysfunctional Brain Circuits in Depression
Conor Liston, MD, PhD, is a clinical psychiatrist specializing in the management of treatment-resistant mood disorders. He’s also an associate professor of neuroscience and psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine.
About This Event
Depression is a heterogeneous psychiatric disorder, not a unitary disease entity. It is assumed to comprise multiple subtypes that are driven by different pathophysiological mechanisms and require different treatments, but there is no consensus on how to treat them. Here, I will discuss recent progress in parsing heterogeneity in depression by defining subtypes anchored in fMRI measures of functional connectivity and other biological features. Next, I will discuss new findings from longitudinal imaging studies of densely sampled individuals, showing that the frontostriatal salience network is expanded twofold in most individuals with depression. These findings demonstrate that salience network expansion was unexpectedly stable over time, unaffected by changes in mood state, detectable in children before the subsequent onset of depressive symptoms in adolescence, and caused primarily by network border shifts affecting specific functional systems, with three distinct modes of encroachment occurring in different individuals. I will conclude by reviewing new methods for antidepressant treatment matching based on these approaches.
Learning Objectives
- Discuss recent progress in parsing heterogeneity in depression.
- Identify three changes in functional network topology that occur in different patient subgroups.
- Discuss implications for therapeutic neuromodulation and treatment matching.
About the Visiting Professor Lecture Series
The Child Mind Institute Visiting Professor Lecture Series invites leaders in the field of child and adolescent mental health to talk about the latest research and treatment protocols. All events are open to the public. This year, all lectures will be hosted virtually over Zoom. In partnership with Northwell Health, continuing medical education (CME) credits for psychiatrists and continuing education (CE) credits for psychologists are available to registered course participants.
