Anxiety may help combat depression: Study

If you are among those who worry a lot, chances are that you won't suffer from depression as a new study claims that fretfulness may help relieve the condition of feeling low and sad.

The University of Illinois study found that unlike vigilance that aggravates depression, anxiety associated with worrying may neutralise brain activity and help combat the ill effects of the condition. "Sometimes worry is a good thing to do. Maybe it will get you to plan better. There could be an up-side to these things," said lead researcher Professor Gregory A Miller. "It could be that having a particular type of anxiety will help processing in one part of the brain while at the same time hurting processing in another part of the brain." For their study, the researchers looked at depression and two types of anxiety -- anxious arousal ( the fearful vigilance that sometimes turns into panic) and anxious apprehension, better known as worry, LiveScience reported. The study involved a task wherein the subjects were asked to identify colours of words connotative of negative, positive or neutral meanings, ignoring the latter part. Then they used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to scan the subjects' brain areas that became activated in response to emotional words. They looked at such brain activities in different types of patients -- those who were depressed and not anxious, those who were anxious but not depressed and those who showed signs of variable degrees of depression along with one or both types of anxiety. They found that the fMRI signature of the brain of a worried and depressed person doing the emotional word task was very different from that of a vigilant or panicky depressed person. It was observed that anxious arousal enhanced activity in that part of the right frontal lobe that is also active in depression, but only when a person's level of anxious apprehension (or worry) was low.Neural activity in a region of the left frontal lobe -- an area known to be involved in speech production -- was found higher in the depressed and worried-but-not-fearful subjects. Despite their depression, the worriers also did better on the emotional word task than those depressives who were fearful or vigilant.Hence, it was established that worriers performed the task better implying that they had better ability to ignore the meaning of negative words and concentrate on the task. Prof Wendy Heller, co-author of the study, said: "Although we think of depression and anxiety as separate things, they often co-occur.""The combination of depression and anxiety, and which type of anxiety, give you different brain results."The study appears in the journal Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience