Psychiatry - Theses
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ItemEffective connectivity in major depressive disorder and its association with treatment response: a functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation( 2021)Despite effective first-line treatments for major depressive disorder (MDD), prognostic outcomes for many young people remain poor. Recent investigations into the interactions between brain regions, both at rest and during specific tasks, appear to suggest that abnormalities in these connections may contribute to the manifestation of depressive symptoms. An improved characterisation of brain associated dysfunction in MDD may elucidate contributing factors to this heterogeneity in treatment response. This thesis used functional magnetic resonance imaging and dynamic causal modelling across three studies to characterise abnormalities in the directional interactions between brain regions. Due to the lack of research examining how different emotional expressions modulate these directional interactions, Study 1 aimed to explore changes to effective connectivity present during the implicit processing of negatively valenced emotional expressions in a sample of healthy adolescents and young adults (N = 92, Mean age = 20.1 +/- 2.9 years). Processing sad and fearful facial expressions were associated with greater positive connectivity from the amygdala to dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). Compared with processing sad faces, processing fearful faces was associated with significantly greater connectivity from the amygdala to dlPFC. Study 2 aimed to examine whether there were differences in effective connectivity between MDD patients and healthy controls during the processing of facial expressions. The healthy controls from Study 1 were compared with a sample of MDD patients (N = 88, Mean age = 19.8 +/- 2.7 years). Following their scan, these patients were randomised to receive cognitive behavioural therapy for 12 weeks, plus either fluoxetine or placebo. Depressed patients demonstrated reduced inhibition from the dlPFC to ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and reduced excitation from the dlPFC to amygdala during sad expression processing. During fearful expression processing patients showed reduced inhibition from the vmPFC to amygdala and reduced excitation from the amygdala to dlPFC. Treatment responders demonstrated greater excitation from the amygdala to dlPFC during sad expression processing and reduced excitation from the amygdala to vmPFC connectivity during fearful expression processing. Finally, Study 3 aimed to examine differences in the effective connectivity at rest between regions commonly implicated in the neurobiology of depression, using the healthy controls (N = 90; Mean age = 20.1 +/- 2.7) and MDD patients (N = 94; Mean age = 19.7 +/- 2.8) from Study 2. Depressed patients demonstrated greater inhibitory connectivity from the rostral anterior cingulate (rACC) to the dlPFC, anterior insular cortex, dorsal anterior cingulate (dACC) and left amygdala. Moreover, treatment responders illustrated greater inhibitory connectivity from the rACC to dACC, greater excitatory connectivity from the dACC to subgenual anterior cingulate (sgACC) and reduced inhibitory connectivity from the sgACC to amygdalae at baseline. Together the findings from these studies detail widespread but distinct alterations associated with MDD which occur at rest and during the implicit processing of sad and fearful facial expressions. These results commonly suggest that MDD is marked by abnormal interactions between regions of the salience, central executive and default mode networks. Across both of our tasks, treatment responders did not demonstrate connectivity which was more similar to healthy controls, but rather illustrated unique alterations that may have predicated their enhanced treatment response. Moreover, while these parameters were shown to be overall predictive of treatment response, in both tasks this was particularly strong for those treated with CBT and placebo. We suggest that this effect may be due to treatment with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors altering connectivity variability in such a way that this baseline configuration is less informative of future response.