Altered resting-state functional network connectivity is associated with suicide attempt in young depressed patients

The purpose of this study was to investigate the changes in resting-state brain functional network connectivity (FNC) in young depressed patients with and without suicidal behavior, and the relationship between FNC and suicidal attempts in depressed youths using resting-state fMRI (RS-fMRI). We conducted independent component analysis (ICA) to identify intrinsically connected neural networks and analyze the alterations of intra- and inter-network connectivity using FNC analysis in 35 depressed youth with suicidal attempts (SU group), 18 patients without suicidal attempts (NSU group) and 47 healthy controls (HC), and investigate brain-behavior associations between the FNC coefficients and clinical behavior in the SU group. SU group showed significantly decreased internetwork connectivity between anterior default mode network (aDMN) and salience network (SN), as well as the right frontal-parietal network (rFPN). However, the internetwork connectivity between the SN and rFPN in SU group was higher than that in NSU group. Moreover, decreased aDMN-rFPN connectivity was negatively correlated with BHS scores, and the differences in SN-rFPN and aDMN-pDMN connectivity were negatively associated with the HAMD score in the SU group. Our findings may provide new insights into the patterns of functional organization in the brain of suicidal depressed patients.