Altered network efficiency in major depressive disorder

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is associated with dysfunction between cognitive control and affective processing system. However, little is known about alterations of the nodal and edge efficiency in abnormal systems of MDD patients. We used two independent datasets and two different structural templates to investigate the alterations of the nodal and edge efficiency of whole-brain functional networks of MDD.

Forty-two MDD and forty-two age, education-matched controls were selected to investigate network efficiency abnormalities of the MDD patients’ cortical and subcortical regions, as well as the disrupted functional connectivity between these regions, from the perspective of network topological architectures. In addition, another dataset, which included thirty MDD patients and thirty controls, was also investigated using the same method.

Results showed that MDD group demonstrated significant increase in the local efficiency, although not change of global efficiency. In addition, nodal efficiency was found to increase in affective processing regions (i.e., amygdale, thalamus, hippocampus), but decrease in cognitive control related regions, which included dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex. The edge efficiency was found to increase, involving both connectivity between thalamus and limbic system regions and connectivity between hippocampus and regions (i.e., amygdala, thalamus). More important, result was replicated within independent datasets for the first and different structural templates for another.

Our results indicated that MDD was associated with disrupted functional connectivity networks between cognitive control and affective processing systems. The findings might shed light on the pathological mechanism of depression and provide potential biomarkers for clinic treatment of depression.