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Altered Effective Connectivity Among the Cerebellum and Cerebrum in Patients with Major Depressive Disorder Using Multisite Resting-State fMRI

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Abstract

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a serious and widespread psychiatric disorder. Previous studies mainly focused on cerebrum functional connectivity, and the sample size was relatively small. However, functional connectivity is undirected. And, there is increasing evidence that the cerebellum is also involved in emotion and cognitive processing and makes outstanding contributions to the symptomology and pathology of depression. Therefore, we used a large sample size of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) data to investigate the altered effective connectivity (EC) among the cerebellum and other cerebral cortex in patients with MDD. Here, from the perspective of data-driven analysis, we used two different atlases to divide the whole brain into different regions and analyzed the alterations of EC and EC networks in the MDD group compared with healthy controls group (HCs). The results showed that compared with HCs, there were significantly altered EC in the cerebellum-neocortex and cerebellum-basal ganglia circuits in MDD patients, which implied that the cerebellum may be a potential biomarker of depressive disorders. And, the alterations of EC brain networks in MDD patients may provide new insights into the pathophysiological mechanisms of depression.

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Funding

This work was supported by Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province of China (No. 2019JJ40387), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.61972419 and 61672542), the Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province of China (No. 2020JJ4120), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of Central South University. We thank REST-meta-MDD Consortium for sharing and providing dataset, and we are grateful for resources from the High Performance Computing Center of Central South University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan, China

    Peishan Dai, Xiaoyan Zhou, Tong Xiong, Yilin Ou, Zailiang Chen & Beiji Zou

  2. Department of Psychiatry, and National Clinical Research Center for Mental Disorders, The Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University, Changsha, Hunan, China

    Weihui Li

  3. Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Basic Medical Science, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan, China

    Zhongchao Huang

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Dai, P., Zhou, X., Xiong, T. et al. Altered Effective Connectivity Among the Cerebellum and Cerebrum in Patients with Major Depressive Disorder Using Multisite Resting-State fMRI. Cerebellum 22, 781–789 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12311-022-01454-9

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