The Australian and New Zealand journal of psychiatry
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Aust N Z J Psychiatry · Jun 2019
Functional dysconnectivity within the emotion-regulating system is associated with affective symptoms in major depressive disorder: A resting-state fMRI study.
Major depressive disorder (MDD) can be characterized as a multidimensional and system-level disorder. The neuropathophysiological abnormalities have been reported to be distributed in emotion regulation system, involving the prefrontal cortex (PFC), limbic and striatum in convergent studies. Decrease of positive affect and increase of negative affect are recognized as a hallmark of MDD. However, the dysfunctions in affective processing in MDD within the emotion regulation system remains largely unclear. In this study, our goals are to characterize the dysconnectivity pattern within this system and explore the relationships between this kind of dysconnectivity pattern and affective symptoms, which might help us better look into the neuropathophysiological mechanisms underlying MDD. ⋯ These findings demonstrated that MDD showed characteristic pathological alterations of the emotion regulation system. Dysconnectivity within prefrontal-limbic system might be more related to the dysregulation of negative affect, whereas dysconnectivity within prefrontal-striatum system might influence more on positive affect processing. The decrease in positive affect and increase in negative affect in MDD might have different pathological basis. These results could help better understand the dysconnectivity pattern in the emotion-regulating system underlying depression.