fMRI during affect discrimination in bipolar affective disorder.

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Psychiatry
• Brain Imaging

Background:

• Affective disturbances are hypothesized as etiologic factors in bipolar affective disorder.
• Neural mechanisms of affect and their link to bipolar disorder pathophysiology require clarification.
• Neuroimaging advances enable non-invasive examination of brain regions during affective tasks.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate neural mechanisms of affect recognition in bipolar affective disorder using fMRI.
• To compare brain activation patterns during fearful and happy affect recognition between bipolar patients and healthy controls.
• To explore the relationship between neural activity, affect recognition, and bipolar disorder.

Main Methods:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to acquire brain data.
• Participants viewed and identified fearful and happy facial expressions.
• 1.5 Tesla echo planar scanning with specialized coils was performed.

Main Results:

• Bipolar patients exhibited reduced dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activation and increased amygdala activation to fearful faces.
• Healthy subjects did not show significant signal changes in these regions.
• Bipolar patients had impaired recognition of fearful, but not happy, facial affect.

Conclusions:

• Findings support the hypothesis of reduced frontal cortical function in some bipolar disorder patients.
• This frontal dysfunction may be linked to deficits in affective and attentional processing.
• Altered amygdala and prefrontal cortex activity may underlie emotional processing impairments in bipolar disorder.