Abnormally increased effective connectivity between parahippocampal gyrus and ventromedial prefrontal regions during emotion labeling in bipolar disorder

Jorge R.C. Almeida, Andrea Mechelli, Stefanie Hassel, Amelia Versace, David J. Kupfer, Mary L. Phillips

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Emotional liability and mood dysregulation characterize bipolar disorder (BD), yet no study has examined effective connectivity between parahippocampal gyrus and prefrontal cortical regions in ventromedial and dorsal/lateral neural systems subserving mood regulation in BD. Participants comprised 46 individuals (age range: 18-56 years): 21 with a DSM-IV diagnosis of BD, type I currently remitted; and 25 age- and gender-matched healthy controls (HC). Participants performed an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging paradigm, viewing mild and intense happy and neutral faces. We employed dynamic causal modeling (DCM) to identify significant alterations in effective connectivity between BD and HC. Bayes model selection was used to determine the best model. The right parahippocampal gyrus (PHG) and right subgenual cingulate gyrus (sgCG) were included as representative regions of the ventromedial neural system. The right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) region was included as representative of the dorsal/lateral neural system. Right PHG-sgCG effective connectivity was significantly greater in BD than HC, reflecting more rapid, forward PHG-sgCG signaling in BD than HC. There was no between-group difference in sgCG-DLPFC effective connectivity. In BD, abnormally increased right PHG-sgCG effective connectivity and reduced right PHG activity to emotional stimuli suggest a dysfunctional ventromedial neural system implicated in early stimulus appraisal, encoding and automatic regulation of emotion that may represent a pathophysiological functional neural mechanism for mood dysregulation in BD.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)195-201
Number of pages7
JournalPsychiatry Research
Volume174
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 30 Dec 2009

Bibliographical note

© 2009, Elsevier. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Keywords

  • magnetic resonance imaging
  • young adult
  • emotions
  • bipolar disorder
  • humans
  • Bayes Theorem
  • statistical models
  • prefrontal cortex
  • parahippocampal gyrus
  • oxygen
  • brain mapping
  • adult
  • neural pathways
  • nonlinear dynamics
  • case-control studies
  • neuropsychological tests
  • computer-assisted image processing
  • female
  • male
  • emotion regulation
  • neuroimaging
  • fMRI
  • dynamic causal modeling
  • effective connectivity

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