Recent brain imaging research has provided evidence that people with depression have a tendency to exhibit defective gastric intercept neural processing, particularly in individuals who exhibit a high level of rumination. Read the article and find out why.
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What does the research say?
Repetitive negative thinking in people suffering from depression is a very significant psychological problem, explains the author of the research, Salvador M. Guinjoan, an investigator at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research and a professor at the Health Sciences Center at the University of Oklahoma in Tulsa.
In Guinjoan's research, it was noted that people with a constancy in brooding over negative thoughts may have a high chance of a recurrence of depression after treatment for the disease.
In previous research by the teacher, brooding was reported to be linked to poor emotional learning skills. “And one possible mechanism for this to happen was that interceptive feedback (i.e., body information that conveys emotions) was defective in people with depression.” said the teacher.
How the study was carried out
A survey was carried out with 97 people who suffer from depression, among them 48 people were identified as individuals with a high frequency of ruminating thoughts and the other 49 with lower frequencies. The researchers also recruited 27 healthy volunteers, who served as a control group.
The participants were instituted to selectively attend to originating sensations, sensations of the heart and stomach, while the researchers performed magnetic resonance imaging to monitor brain.
Compared to the 27 healthy volunteers, the depressives exhibited reduced central processing and interceptive information from the stomach to the brain regions. It was also seen that individuals who brood more also exhibited reduced processing of stomach sensations in the hippocampus, amygdala and cortex, regions that play a fundamental role in memory and emotional processing and perception.
“We observed that people with depression have a problem with central processing of information that originated specifically in the intestine, in relation to having a greater tendency to ruminate,” Guinjoan told the PsyPost. The researchers reported a surprise discovery of these brain abnormalities.
