The cerebral cortical appearance in depressed subjects

This paper describes a comparison of the cerebral cortical appearance of 101 patients with a history of clinical depression and 52 control subjects. An age-related increase in sulcal widening was evident in both groups. However, after controlling for age, the patients were found to differ from control subjects in two respects: they had a greater amount of sulcal widening, most noticeably in the frontal and temporal areas; and there was a positive correlation between increasing sulcal widening and increasing lateral ventricular size not found in the control subjects. Patients with a past history of treatment by electroconvulsive therapy showed more sulcal widening in the parietal and occipital areas than those not so treated.