Disrupted Regional Homogeneity in Melancholic and Non-melancholic Major Depressive Disorder at Rest

Background: Melancholic depression has been viewed as one severe subtype of major depressive disorder (MDD). However, it is unclear whether melancholic depression has distinct changes in brain imaging. We aimed to explore specific or distinctive alterations in melancholic MDD and whether the alterations could be used to separate melancholic MDD from non-melancholic MDD or healthy controls. Materials and Methods: Thirty-one outpatients with melancholic MDD and thirty-three outpatients with non-melancholic MDD and thirty-two age- and gender-matched healthy controls were recruited. All participants were scanned by resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Imaging data were analyzed with the regional homogeneity (ReHo) and support vector machine (SVM) methods. Results: Melancholic MDD patients exhibited lower ReHo in the right superior occipital gyrus/middle occipital gyrus than non-melancholic MDD patients and healthy controls. Merely for non-melancholic MDD patients, decreased ReHo in the right middle frontal gyrus was negatively correlated with the total HRSD-17 scores. SVM analysis results showed that a combination of abnormal ReHo in the right fusiform gyrus/cerebellum Crus I and the right superior occipital gyrus/middle occipital gyrus exhibited the highest accuracy of 83.05% (49/59), with a sensitivity of 90.32% (28/31), and a specificity of 75.00% (21/28) for discriminating patients with melancholic MDD from patients with non-melancholic MDD. And a combination of abnormal ReHo in the right fusiform gyrus/cerebellum VI and left postcentral gyrus/precentral gyrus exhibited the highest accuracy of 98.41% (62/63), with a sensitivity of 96.77% (30/31), and a specificity of 100.00%(32/32) for separating patients with melancholic MDD from healthy controls. Conclusion: Our findings showed the distinctive ReHo pattern in patients with melancholic MDD and found brain area that may be associated with the pathophysiology of non-melancholic MDD. Potential imaging markers for discriminating melancholic MDD from non-melancholic MDD or healthy controls were reported.