Children with certain brain features are far more likely to develop depression later in life, according to a new study. The findings, by Harvard and MIT researchers, could pave the way to using brain scans to predict, diagnose, and treat the mental-health condition years before symptoms appear.

For the study, scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School found distinctive brain differences in children known to be at high risk because of family history of depression — which could be could be used to identify those whose risk was previously unknown.

"We'd like to develop the tools to be able to identify people at true risk, independent of why they got there, with the ultimate goal of maybe intervening early and not waiting for depression to strike the person," said John Gabrieli, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT and author of the study, which appears in the journal Biological Psychiatry.

Early intervention is important because once a person suffers from an episode of depression, they become more likely to have another.

"If you can avoid that first bout, maybe it would put the person on a different trajectory," noted Gabrieli

For the study, Gabrieli and his colleagues studied 27 high-risk children, ranging in age from eight to 14, and compared them with a group of 16 children with no known family history of depression.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers uncovered differences in regions and functions of the brain associated with depression.