Aberrant brain responses to emotionally valent words is normalised after cognitive behavioural therapy in female depressed adolescents.

Background: Depression in adolescence is debilitating with high recurrence in adulthood, yet its pathophysiological mechanism remains enigmatic. To examine the interaction between emotion, cognition and treatment, functional brain responses to sad and happy distractors in an affective go/no-go task were explored before and after Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) in depressed female adolescents, and healthy participants.

Methods: Eighty-two Depressed and 24 healthy female adolescents, aged 12-17 years, performed a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) affective go/no-go task at baseline.