Depression in the Elderly Posted on July 7, 2008 Howard J. Aizenstein (bio) explains his use of neuroimaging to study depression in the elderly.

My research is in neuroimaging and geriatric psychiatry. I look at changes in the functional neuroanatomy and changes in the brain associated with individuals with late-life depression. So one of the big questions is, depression is very common in the elderly and most of the treatments for depression in the elderly are based on the same treatments used in midlife; however, they don't work all that well in the elderly. Fifty percent of the time elderly individuals with depression don't respond well to the standard treatments.

And so one reason we think that might be the case is because the brain is different in the elderly and depression is caused by different things in late life. And some of the things it might be caused by are that depression could be an early syndrome, symptom of dementic process. Also there could be some vascular changes associated with aging that could be causing depression, and of course there's a lot of psychosocial changes in the aging that are associated with depression. So what we're looking at is what's unique about the biology changes in the brain in late life that can contribute to depression.

We're doing this looking at the brain functionally in individuals in magnetic resonance imaging to look at the brain changes and then also looking at structural changes in the brain and try to associate that with how the individuals respond to treatment.

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