Common and distinct abnormal frontal-limbic system structural and functional patterns in patients with major depression and bipolar disorder

Aug 3, 2018NeuroImage. Clinical

Shared and unique changes in thinking and emotion brain systems in major depression and bipolar disorder

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Abstract

Both major depressive disorder (MDD) and bipolar disorder (BD) patients exhibit decreased gray matter volume in the left anterior cingulate cortex and right hippocampus compared to healthy controls.

Both MDD and BD patients showed reduced gray matter volume in specific brain regions compared to healthy individuals.
MDD patients had additional decreased gray matter volume in the left superior frontal gyrus compared to BD patients.
Both patient groups exhibited decreased resting-state functional connectivity between the left anterior cingulate cortex and the left orbitofrontal cortex.
MDD patients demonstrated decreased functional connectivity between the left superior frontal gyrus and the left hippocampus relative to healthy controls.
MDD and BD patients displayed more similarities than differences in gray matter volume and functional connectivity.

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Major depressive disorder (MDD) and bipolar disorder (BD) are common severe affective diseases. Although previous neuroimaging studies have investigated brain abnormalities in MDD or BD, the structural and functional differences between these two disorders remain unclear. In this study, we adopted a multimodal approach, combining voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and functional connectivity (FC), to study the common and distinct structural and functional alterations in unmedicated MDD and BD patients. The VBM analysis revealed that both the MDD and BD patients showed decreased gray matter volume (GMV) in the left anterior cingulate cortex (ACC_L) and right hippocampus (HIP_R) compared with the healthy controls, and the MDD patients showed decreased GMV in the left superior frontal gyrus (SFG_L) and ACC_L compared with the BD patients. Furthermore, we took these clusters as seed regions to analyze the abnormal resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) in the patients. We found that both the MDD and BD groups had decreased RSFC between the ACC_L and the left orbitofrontal cortex (OFC_L) and that the MDD group had decreased RSFC between the SFG_L and the HIP_L, compared with the healthy controls. Our results revealed that the MDD and BD patients were more similar than different in GMV and RSFC. These findings indicate that investigating the frontal-limbic system could be useful for understanding the underlying mechanisms of these two disorders.

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Abstract

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