Application Of Functional Near-infrared Spectroscopy In The Treatment Of First-episode Depression

Objective:Depressive disorders are a group of psychiatric disorders of unknown etiology and severe chronic affective disorders.At present,the diagnosis of depressive disorders mainly relies on the subjective recognition of depressive symptom groups by psychiatrists,and there is a lack of precise objective markers to distinguish depressive disorder patients from healthy people,which may easily lead to missed diagnosis and misdiagnosis,resulting in waste of medical resources and poor patient compliance.This study is to investigate whether functional near-infrared spectroscopy can be a novel biomarker and analyze its value for clinical diagnosis,guiding treatment and judging prognosis of patients with depressive disorders.Methods:Forty patients with depressive disorders who had their first episode of depression in the inpatient unit of the Department of Psychosomatic Medicine at the First Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang University between August 2022 and February 2023 were included,and 27 healthy subjects were recruited from the surrounding community and schools during the same period,and the activation of the cerebral cortex during the execution of verbal fluency tasks in both groups and the activation of the cerebral cortex during the execution of verbal fluency tasks in patients with depressive disorders before and after treatment were recorded using functional nearinfrared spectroscopy.The activation of the cerebral cortex during the verbal fluency task in the two groups and the activation of the cerebral cortex during the verbal fluency task in the depressed patients before and after treatment were recorded using functional near-infrared spectroscopy.The Hamilton Depression Inventory-17 items were used to reflect the severity of depressive disorder patients,and the data obtained were processed using the MATLAB integrated software package and analyzed using SPSS.26 P < 0.05 was considered statistically significant.Results:It was found that patients with depressive disorders had significantly lower dorsolateral prefrontal oxyhemoglobin concentrations compared to healthy subjects,and their oxyhemoglobin levels were negatively correlated with Hamilton Depression Inventory scores.Patients with depressive disorders treated with antidepressant therapy showed a significant increase in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activity compared to pre-treatment activation levels.Conclusion:The presence of reduced prefrontal cortex activity in patients with depressive disorders compared to healthy controls performing a verbal fluency task and the restoration of activation levels in some of the channels after treatment in patients with depressive disorders could potentially be a biomarker for the diagnosis of depressive disorders as well as allow for the assessment of treatment effects.