Altered Functional Connectivity and Complexity in Major Depressive Disorder after Musical Stimulation

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Psychiatry
• Biomedical Engineering

Background:

• Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a prevalent mental illness impacting brain function.
• Understanding alterations in brain network connectivity is crucial for diagnosing and treating MDD.
• Electroencephalography (EEG) offers a non-invasive method to study brain activity and functional connectivity.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the effects of music therapy on brain network connectivity in MDD patients.
• To analyze changes in functional brain connectivity before and after musical stimulation using EEG.
• To explore the potential of EEG-derived network characteristics for classifying MDD.

Main Methods:

• Collected EEG data from eight MDD patients and eight healthy controls.
• Utilized the phase locking value to quantify EEG correlations across different channels and frequency bands.
• Analyzed correlation matrices and network topologies to assess functional connectivity changes.

Main Results:

• Music therapy led to decreased connectivity in delta and beta frequency bands and increased connectivity in the alpha band.
• Significant decreases in average clustering coefficient, characteristic path length, and node degree were observed in the delta band post-stimulation.
• A significant increase in characteristic path length was noted in the beta band.
• A support vector machine model achieved 93.75% accuracy in classifying MDD patients versus healthy controls based on network characteristics.

Conclusions:

• Music therapy induces measurable changes in brain network functional connectivity in MDD patients.
• EEG-based network analysis can identify distinct patterns associated with MDD.
• These findings suggest music therapy's potential therapeutic role and highlight EEG as a valuable tool for MDD assessment.