In some people, new-onset depression may stem from the same buildup of toxic plaques in the brain that have long been linked to Alzheimer's disease, according to a new study. "Our findings provide additional support for depressive symptoms as an early feature of preclinical Alzheimer's disease," wrote a team led by Catherine Munro. She's a neuropsychologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
"It's not that depression caused Alzheimer's disease, it's just that Alzheimer's disease pathology affecting this part of the brain resulted in depressive symptoms relatively early on in the course," explained another expert, Dr. Marc Gordon, who wasn't involved in the study. He's chief of neurology at Northwell's Zucker Hillside Hospital in Great Neck, N.
Y. As the Boston researchers point out, " neuropsychiatric symptoms , particularly depression, are common in Alzheimer's disease." But the exact links between depression and Alzheimer's have been unclear.
In the new study, Munro and colleagues tracked rates of depressive symptoms in 154 people enrolled in the ongoing Harvard Aging Brain Study. The findings are published in the journal JAMA Network Open . All were mentally unimpaired as they joined the study, and data were collected between 2010 and 2022.
That data included the results of PET scans taken of each patient's brain once every two to three years for an average of just under nine years. Those scans looked for the accumulation of amyloid protein plaques within brain tiss.