Professor Wayne Drevets describes dendritic atrophy, which refers to reductions in the branching of neurons.

What I referred to as dendritic atrophy refers to the change in the branching of neurons. A neuron in many ways is shaped kind of like a tree, where the cell body of the neuron would be like the trunk of the tree, but then a lot of the volume is made up by the branches and then the leaves on the end of the branches. And so if you think about the neuron cell body as the trunk of the tree and then the dendritic branches like the branches of a tree, and then the synapses on the end of those dendritic trees like the leaves, what you see in both depression and repeated stress models is that branches have actually dropped off. So you have less branches. Then synapses have dropped off and so you have less leaves. And so it changes function through this remodeling of these neuron dendritic trees.

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