FRIDAY, Aug. 21 Loss of interest in previously pleasant activities is a common sign of despair and it's a neurological response that investigators can actually see in the brain.

When listening to their much loved music, depressed people showed less activity in regions of the brain that are concerned with experiencing pleasure and processing rewards compared with healthy people, Canadian researchers found.

In the study, the researchers asked 15 non-depressed people and 16 people recently diagnosed with sadness for a list of their favorite music and music that they felt neutral about (neither liked nor disliked). contributors then listened to their musical selections for three minutes.


Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of the brain showed that the non-depressed participants had more neural activity in numerous areas of the brain associated with reward processing and pleasure than depressed participants did, according to the report published in the Aug. 26 issue of the journal NeuroReport.

The examiner said the findings show a neurological underpinning for a common depressive symptom and suggest that sadness can interfere with enjoyment of something as basic as music.

"Our results revealed important responses within the areas of the brain that are associated with reward processing in healthy individuals. They also showed important deficits in these neurophysiological responses in recently depressed subjects compared to the healthy subjects," Dr. Elizabeth Osuch, a researcher at the Lawson Health Research Institute in Ontario, said in a news release from the journal's publisher.

The findings may advise new treatments for depression, the study authors said.

"If we can target these areas of the brain through treatment, we have the possible to treat depression earlier, right at the source," Osuch added.