Progress in neuro-psychopharmacology & biological psychiatrySep 8, 2019

Unusual patterns in brain communication networks in unipolar depression and bipolar disorder using precise network analysis

Circadian Biology Weekly Brief ↗PubMed ↗DOI ↗

Updated Apr 4, 2026

Abstract

Functional brain networks in 36 unipolar depression (UD) patients and 42 bipolar disorder type I (BD-I) patients show distinct alterations compared to 45 healthy controls.

Both UD and BD-I patients exhibited preserved modularity and small-worldness in their functional brain networks.
A reduced number of modules was observed in both patient groups compared to healthy controls, indicating shared alterations.
Common changes were identified in brain regions including the hippocampus, para hippocampal gyrus, amygdala, and superior parietal gyrus.
Distinct changes in modular composition were mainly noted in the caudate regions of the basal ganglia in both disorders.
BD-I patients showed significantly decreased global efficiency and small-worldness compared to healthy controls.
Local efficiency was significantly decreased in several regions for both UD and BD-I patients, with a specific increase in participant coefficient found in the right paracentral lobule and the right thalamus for UD.

Simplified

Two popular debilitating illness, unipolar depression (UD) and bipolar disorder (BD), have the similar symptoms and tight association on the psychopathological level, leading to a clinical challenge to distinguish them. In order to figure out the underlying common and different mechanism of both mood disorders, resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) data derived from 36 UD patients, 42 BD patients (specially type I, BD-I) and 45 healthy controls (HC) were analyzed retrospectively in this study. Functional brain networks were firstly constructed on both group and individual levels with a density 0.2, which was determined by a network thresholding approach based on modular similarity. Then we investigated the alterations of modular structure and other topological properties of the functional brain network, including global network characteristics and nodal network measures. The results demonstrated that the functional brain networks of UD and BD-I groups preserved the modularity and small-worldness property. However, compared with HC, reduced number of modules was observed in both patients' groups with shared alterations occurring in hippocampus, para hippocampal gyrus, amygdala and superior parietal gyrus and distinct changes of modular composition mainly in the caudate regions of basal ganglia. Additionally, for the network characteristics, compared to HC, significantly decreased global efficiency and small-worldness were observed in BD-I. For the nodal metrics, significant decrease of local efficiency was found in several regions in both UD and BD-I, while a UD-specified increase of participant coefficient was found in the right paracentral lobule and the right thalamus. These findings may contribute to throw light on the neuropathological mechanisms underlying the two disorders and further help to explore objective biomarkers for the correct diagnosis of UD and BD.

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Unusual patterns in brain communication networks in unipolar depression and bipolar disorder using precise network analysis

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