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"Our findings are the first results in living depressed patients to suggest that this microglial activation is most prominent in those with suicidal thinking," said Dr. Talbot. Previous studies suggesting this link have relied on brain tissue collected from patients after death. "This paper is an important addition to the view that inflammation is a feature of the neurobiology of a subgroup of depressed patients, in this case the group with suicidal ideation," said Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry. "This observation is particularly important in light of recent evidence supporting a personalized medicine approach to depression, i.e., that anti-inflammatory drugs may have antidepressant effects that are limited to patients with demonstrable inflammation." In the study, first author Dr. Sophie Holmes and colleagues assessed inflammation in 14 patients with moderate-to-severe depression who were not currently taking any antidepressant m...

Florida State University College of Medicine Associate Professor Antonio Terracciano joined a team of researchers from the United States, United Kingdom and Italy to examine the connection between personality traits and brain structure. Their study, published in the journal  Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience , looked at differences in the anatomy of the cortex (the outer layer of the brain) as indexed by three measures -- the thickness, area, and amount of folding in the cortex -- and how these measures related to the five major personality traits. The traits include neuroticism , the tendency to be in a negative emotional state; extraversion, the tendency to be sociable and enthusiastic; openness, how open-minded a person is; agreeableness, a measure of altruism and cooperativeness; and conscientiousness, a measure of self-control and determination. The study involved an imaging dataset from more than 500 individuals made publicly available by the Human Connectome...