Abnormal degree centrality can be a potential imaging biomarker in first-episode, drug-naive bipolar mania

Brain network abnormalities in emotional response exist in bipolar mania. However, few studies have been published on network degree centrality of first-episode, drug-naive bipolar mania, and healthy controls. This study aimed to assess the utility of neural activity values analyzed via degree centrality methods. Sixty-six first-episode, drug-naive patients with bipolar mania and 60 healthy controls participated in resting-state functional magnetic resonance rescanning and scale estimating. The degree centrality and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve methods were used for an analysis of the imaging data. Relative to healthy controls, first-episode bipolar mania patients displayed increased degree centrality values in the left middle occipital gyrus, precentral gyrus, supplementary motor area, Precuneus, and decreased degree centrality values in the left parahippocampal gyrus, right insula and superior frontal gyrus, medial. ROC results exhibited degree centrality values in the left parahippocampal gyrus that could distinguish first-episode bipolar mania patients from healthy controls with 0.8404 for AUC. Support vector machine results showed that reductions in degree centrality values in the left parahippocampal gyrus can be used to effectively differentiate between bipolar disorder patients and healthy controls with respective accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity values of 83.33%, 85.51%, and 88.41%. Increased activity in the left parahippocampal gyrus may be a distinctive neurobiological feature of first-episode, drug-naive bipolar mania. Degree centrality values in the left parahippocampal gyrus might be served as a potential neuroimaging biomarker to discriminate first-episode, drug-naive bipolar mania patients from healthy controls.