Altered dynamic amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations in patients with postpartum depression

Postpartum depression (PPD) is a common mood disorder with increasing incidence year by year. However, the dynamic changes in local neural activity of patients with PPD remain unclear. In this study, we utilized the dynamic amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (dALFF) method to investigate the abnormal temporal variability of local neural activity and its potential correlation with clinical severity in PPD.

Twenty-four patients with PPD and nineteen healthy primiparous mothers controls (HCs) matched for age, education level and body mass index were examined by resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI). A sliding-window method was used to assess the dALFF, and a k-means clustering method was used to identify dALFF states. Two-sample t-test was used to compare the differences of dALFF variability and state metrics between PPD and HCs. Pearson correlation analysis was used to analyze the relationship between dALFF variability, states metrics and clinical severity.

(1) Patients with PPD had lower variance of dALFF than HCs in the cognitive control network, cerebellar network and sensorimotor network. (2) Four dALFF states were identified, and patients with PPD spent more time on state 2 than the other three states. The number of transitions between the four dALFF states increased in the patients compared with that in HCs. (3) Multiple dALFF states were found to be correlated with the severity of depression. The variance of dALFF in the right middle frontal gyrus was negatively correlated with the Edinburgh postnatal depression scale score.

This study provides new insights into the brain dysfunction of PPD from the perspective of dynamic local brain activity, highlighting the important role of dALFF variability in understanding the neurophysiological mechanisms of PPD.