Depression and accelerated brain aging: A PET imaging study

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PROJECT SUMMARY: Normal aging slowly affects the brain via alterations in synaptic transmission and plasticity through various processes including changes in dendritic spine morphologies and loss of synaptic proteins. Major depressive disorder (MDD) is the most prevalent and disabling psychiatric disorder worldwide and is associated with reduced synaptic signaling proteins, such as presynaptic neurotransmitter vesicle- associated proteins and postsynaptic structural and functional proteins. Converging evidence from human clinical and postmortem studies, and preclinical work suggests that depression may accelerate brain aging, as evidenced by neuronal atrophy, and reduced synaptic and synaptic vesicle protein densities, and vesicle trafficking and growth, particularly in the hippocampus (HIP) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), and may thus represent a prodrome to dementia. In animal and postmortem work, changes in synaptic density have been robustly evaluated via quantification of synaptic vesicle proteins. In vivo quantification of synaptic density in humans was recently made possible with the development of a novel radioligand 11C-UCB-J, which quantifies the density of synaptic vesicle glycoprotein 2A (SV2A), a ubiquitously expressed marker of synaptic density, using positron emission tomography (PET) imaging. In this study, we will conduct the first known in vivo human examination of whether MDD may accelerate synaptic aging over a 25-year span (ages 40-65), as well as how MDD-related changes in synaptic density relate to cognitive functioning and the heterogeneous clinical presentation of this disorder. Our preliminary data from a large normative sample of healthy adults suggest a systematic age-related decline in synaptic density in the HIP and dlPFC, which becomes more pronounced as a function of increasing age. They further reveal a substantially more pronounced decline in synaptic density in the HIP and dlPFC in individuals with MDD compared to age-matched healthy controls. In the proposed study, we will employ a novel accelerated longitudinal design that builds on these initial results by evaluating whether MDD accelerates synaptic aging by examining in vivo changes in synaptic density in the HIP and dlPFC compared to healthy controls across the middle-to-older age spectrum. We will also evaluate how synaptic density in these brain regions relates to the endophenotypic and phenotypic expression of MDD using state-of-the-art objective laboratory, structured clinical interview, and neuropsychological measures. Results of the proposed study will provide the first human in vivo data on the role of MDD as a potential accelerator of synaptic aging, as well as the effect of MDD-related changes in synaptic density on the clinical expression of this multi-faceted disorder. They will also inform pathophysiologic models of how MDD contributes to synaptic aging, and yield new insight into a novel “upstream” mechanism-based target for therapies designed to mitigate accelerated brain aging and risk for cognitive decline and dementia.