MRI-Based Multimodal Approach to the Assessment of Clinical Symptom Severity of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

This study assessed the associations of the abnormal brain activation and functional connectivity (FC) during memory processing and brain volume alteration in conjunction with psychiatric symptom severity in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

Twenty-OCD patients and 20-healthy controls (HC) underwent T1-weighted and functional imaging underlying explicit memory task.

In memory encoding, OCD patients showed higher activities in right/left (Rt./Lt.) inferior temporal gyrus (ITG), medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), compared with HC. In task-based FC, caudate (Cd) was positively connected with DLPFC and ITG in OCD, while HC showed different connectivities of Cd-ACC and Rt.-Lt. ITG. In memory retrieval, only Cd was activated in OCD patients. Cd was positively connected with DLPFC and vmPFC in OCD, but negatively connected between same brain areas in HC. OCD patients showed increased gray matter (GM) volumes of cerebellum, DLPFC, orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), hippocampus, Cd and ITG, and concurrently, increased white matter volumes of DLPFC. In OCD patients, GM volumes of Cd and OFC were positively correlated with HAMA and Y-BOCS. Functional activity changes of Cd in OCD were positively correlated with Y-BOCS.

Our findings support to accessing clinical symptom and its severity linked by brain structural deformation and functional abnormality in OCD patients.