Probabilistic Entity-Relationship Diagram: A correlation between functional connectivity and spontaneous brain...

Alterations of functional connectivity (FC) and spontaneous brain activity (SBA) during the resting state has been observed in subjects with major depressive disorder (MDD). Although there are many studies separately describing on the alterations of FC and SBA in major depressive disorder, their correlation are still have not been performed.

A literature search based on Pubmed and Embase was conducted until 20 April 2016 to identify studies evaluating the correlation for the alterations between functional connectivity and spontaneous brain activity during resting-state in MDD. Meta-analyses were performed using the Probabilistic Entity-Relationship Diagram (PERD) approach to summarize the relationships among multiple factors in an intuitive manner.

A total of 30 studies (747 individuals with MDD and 757 healthy controls) met the inclusion criteria. In this study, we demonstrated that the functional connectivity and spontaneous brain activity, which was quantitatively measured by the primary analysis methods, was decreased in the parahippocampal gyrus, orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and postcentral gyrus (PCG), and increased in insula and left dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) in MDD patients. Furthermore, we found that MDD patients presented negative correlation alterations both FC and SBA in the default mode network and the dorsal attention network, but positive correlation alterations both FC and SBA in the insular network, executive control network, the salience network and the other network.

Our results first suggested that there were correlation alterations between functional connectivity and spontaneous brain activity during resting-state in patients with MDD. Besides, we applied a recent meta-analysis approach (PERD) to summarize and integrate the inconsistence of the existing findings regarding the network dysfunction of MDD.