Altered task-modulated functional connectivity during emotional face processing in euthymic bipolar patients: A
Linling Li1, Xue Han2, Erni Ji3
1School of Biomedical Engineering, Health Science Center, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China; Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Biomedical Measurements and Ultrasound Imaging, Shenzhen 518060, China.
Journal of Affective Disorders
|January 15, 2022
Summary
Bipolar disorder (BD) patients show altered brain connectivity during emotional tasks, particularly in the fronto-parietal network. These widespread functional connectivity changes may represent an endophenotype of BD, persisting even when patients are euthymic.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Psychiatry
- Medical Imaging
Background:
- Bipolar disorder (BD) is associated with facial emotion processing deficits, even during euthymic periods.
- The underlying large-scale functional brain network mechanisms remain unclear.
- Understanding task-modulated functional connectivity (FC) alterations in BD is crucial.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate task-modulated functional connectivity (FC) patterns in euthymic bipolar disorder (BD) patients.
- To identify aberrant FC patterns in distributed brain networks during emotional processing.
- To explore the topological organization of these task-modulated FC networks.
Main Methods:
- Functional MRI (fMRI) data from 29 euthymic BD patients and 29 healthy controls (HC) during a face-matching task.
- Whole-brain psychophysiological interaction (PPI) analysis to assess task-modulated FC.
- Support vector machine (SVM) classification and graph theory analysis to identify and characterize abnormal network topology.
Main Results:
- BD patients exhibited widespread aberrant task-modulated FC across multiple intrinsic brain networks, including fronto-parietal, cingulo-opercular, and default mode networks.
- Alterations were also observed in the cerebellum and sensorimotor/visual processing networks.
- The fronto-parietal network showed significantly increased local efficiency in BD patients.
Conclusions:
- Bipolar disorder is characterized by widely distributed aberrant task-modulated FC patterns, even in the euthymic state.
- The fronto-parietal network is a key network demonstrating changes in both FC strength and local efficiency in BD.
- These findings suggest that altered task-modulated FC may serve as an endophenotype of bipolar disorder.
