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Updated: Jun 23, 2026

Closed-Loop Neurostimulation for Biomarker-Driven, Personalized Treatment of Major Depressive Disorder
Published on: July 7, 2023
Segregated neural representation of psychological and somatic-vegetative symptoms in severe major depression
Alexander Heinzel1, Simone Grimm, Johannes Beck
1Department of Nuclear Medicine, University of Duesseldorf, Germany.
Objective:
The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) is probably the most widely used depression scale. It has been suggested that it contains a two-factor structure measuring cognitive-affective (i.e. psychological) and somatic-vegetative depressive symptoms. In this study we aim to evaluate these factors by probing for their neural correlates.
Methods:
Neural responses evoked by emotional perception, relative to an emotional judgment task, were measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in 20 medication-free patients with severe MDD. Psychological and somatic-vegetative symptoms were evaluated with the BDI.
Results:
Psychological symptoms correlated with signal changes in the dorsomedial and right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, while somatic-vegetative symptoms correlated with signal changes in the pre-genual anterior cingulate cortex.
Conclusions:
These preliminary findings demonstrate segregated neural representation of psychological and somatic-vegetative symptoms of MDD in different cortical regions. Thus, our results indicate that the two-factor structure of the BDI is related to distinct neural correlates.
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