Your hippocampus is part of your limbic system. This brain area stores all the emotional aspects of your life. It determines how we look at ourselves and understand ourselves in this world. The researchers found that, on average, the hippocampus of people who repeatedly experienced depressive episodes shrank as much as 10%.
The Stockholm Psychiatric Research Center conducted a follow-up study on depression patients for 10 years. The results show that the negative effects of chronic depression on hippocampus can be reversed. Correct and individualized treatment can reverse these effects, especially considering that hippocampus is one of the most regenerative areas.
This ability to repair and create new nerves-neurogenesis and neuroplasticity-proves that you can change your brain, reverse the atrophied hippocampus and prevent the recurrence of depression. The sooner depression is treated, the less damage to hippocampus will be.
Can anxiety lead to brain damage?
Anxiety disorder is related to the change of fear neural circuit, for example, the "bottom-up" process of responding to threats in amygdala is exaggerated, while the regulation of these processes by prefrontal cortex (PFC) and hippocampus is weakened. Chronic stress exposure also changes the fear neural circuit by enhancing the function of amygdala, and at the same time leads to the degeneration of PFC and hippocampus structure, thus inhibiting the control of PFC/ hippocampus on stress response.
Drugs (such as antidepressants) and non-drug interventions (cognitive behavioral therapy, exercise) may reverse stress brain injury (Mah, 20 16). As you can see, both depression and anxiety affect people's brains, but they are neither permanent nor irreversible. If you think this answer is helpful, please vote for it.