23-07-10

Konkuk University Glocal Campus School of Medicine Professor Chan-Young Shin and Professor Byeong-Joo Ham of Korea University College of Medicine participated as corresponding authors. Brain Behavior and Immunity (IF=19.227)'.

Depression is a common emotional disorder that 20% of the population experiences at least once in their lifetime. In addition, about 30% of patients are ineffective with existing treatments, so the development of personalized causative factors and treatments is urgently needed.

The research team focused on individual differences in depressive symptoms and conducted a study to discover candidate factors that had linearity with individual differences in depressive symptoms. In the experimental animals, the depressive behaviors of individual animals were ranked in order to determine the order from less depressed animals to severely depressed animals.

Then, based on the linearity, the transcriptome analysis of each animal was conducted, and it was confirmed that there was a linear correlation between the intensity of depression symptoms and the linearity when there was a problem with the inflammatory control mechanism including the IFN σ pathway.

Based on these results, changes in the brain structure of actual depressed patients were confirmed through MRI and epigenetic changes were analyzed in the blood. The correlation was reconfirmed.

The results of the above study are expected to be used in the diagnosis of depression and the development of patient-specific precision treatment through the discovery of new target factors that can directly affect the intensity of individual depressive behavior in animals and humans. In addition, the research method used in this study is expected to be efficiently used for research on psychiatric, neurological, and other intractable diseases in which individual differences are large, in addition to depression.

This study was conducted through a joint research between Professor Byung-Ju Ham of Korea University College of Medicine and the research team of Professor Tae-Jin Ahn of Handong University School of Life Sciences, and supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea's brain disease overcoming project (Research Director: Professor Ham Byeong-ju of Korea University). received and carried out