New research from the University of Alberta suggests changes to key regions of the brain caused by trauma can now be scanned and identified.

A study released on Monday is the first to show that traumatic or stressful events during a child's early years can change sub-regions of a person's amygdala and hippocampus, which are both partially responsible for a person's emotional responses.

Changes brought on by traumatic events can lead to these regions not functioning as they should, which in turn can increase the risk that someone can develop mental health disorders as adults, especially during times of stress.

"People who were traumatized, the particular regions that got impacted didn't grow as well. And that likely has left them much more vulnerable to problems later on in life," said Dr. Peter Silverstone, a psychiatry professor at the U of A and one of the study's co-authors.

The findings by a team of eight researchers at the U of A were published in the current issue of the Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience. Thirty-five participants with major depressive disorder were recruited for this study, along with 35 others acting as control subjects.

With the findings from the study, Silverstone and his colleagues can link changes to brain regions to a history of trauma that occurred decades earlier. Now that they know where changes occur in the brain, Silverstone said they can more accurately test which therapies can reverse the negative effects to the brain from early trauma.

"The hope is that with reversing these changes, they'll be able to deal with stress better and be able to maintain healthy mood," Silverstone said.

Trauma seems to be cumulative, Silverstone said, in that the more you experience the more it affects your brain development. His research finds that changes to a person's brain brought on by trauma can be significant and can make people more likely to experience depression or anxiety even decades later.

This new discovery represents a major and exciting advancement, Silverstone said. Within a few years, he hopes more practical and proven tools will be available to treat patients experiencing mental health problems.

More work to develop therapeutic tools is especially needed now, he said, because of the COVID-19 pandemic. He and his team have seen rates of anxiety and depression really increase during the pandemic, even among people who didn't previously have concerns about their mental health.

Silverstone said he thinks the effects of the pandemic on mental health in chronic fatigue, stress and depression, could continue even after the pandemic ends, creating a big need for more mental health therapeutic tools and treatment.

"We are turning a corner in our understanding of what leads to depression and anxiety," Silverstone said. "But yes, we need to start doing lots of other research to understand where we go next and what works best."