Aberrant single-subject morphological brain networks in first-episode, treatment-naive adolescents with major depressive disorder

Xiaofan Qiu; Junle Li; Fen Pan; Yuping Yang; Weihua Zhou; Jinkai Chen; Ning Wei; Shaojia Lu; Xuchu Weng; Manli Huang; Jinhui Wang

doi:10.1093/psyrad/kkad017

Aberrant single-subject morphological brain networks in first-episode, treatment-naive adolescents with major depressive disorder

Psychoradiology. 2023 Sep 26:3:kkad017. doi: 10.1093/psyrad/kkad017. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Xiaofan Qiu¹, Junle Li¹, Fen Pan^{2

3}, Yuping Yang¹, Weihua Zhou^{2

3}, Jinkai Chen^{2

3}, Ning Wei^{2

3}, Shaojia Lu^{2

3}, Xuchu Weng^{1

4

5

6}, Manli Huang^{2

3

7}, Jinhui Wang^{1

4

5

6}

Affiliations

¹ Institute for Brain Research and Rehabilitation, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China.
² Department of Psychiatry, First Affiliated Hospital, College of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310013, China.
³ The Key Laboratory of Mental Disorder's Management of Zhejiang Province, Hangzhou 310013, China.
⁴ Key Laboratory of Brain, Cognition and Education Sciences, Ministry of Education, Guangzhou 510631, China.
⁵ Center for Studies of Psychological Application, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China.
⁶ Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, Guangzhou 510631, China.
⁷ Zhejiang Engineering Center for Mathematical Mental Health, Hangzhou 310003, China.

Abstract

Background: Neuroimaging-based connectome studies have indicated that major depressive disorder (MDD) is associated with disrupted topological organization of large-scale brain networks. However, the disruptions and their clinical and cognitive relevance are not well established for morphological brain networks in adolescent MDD.

Objective: To investigate the topological alterations of single-subject morphological brain networks in adolescent MDD.

Methods: Twenty-five first-episode, treatment-naive adolescents with MDD and 19 healthy controls (HCs) underwent T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging and a battery of neuropsychological tests. Single-subject morphological brain networks were constructed separately based on cortical thickness, fractal dimension, gyrification index, and sulcus depth, and topologically characterized by graph-based approaches. Between-group differences were inferred by permutation testing. For significant alterations, partial correlations were used to examine their associations with clinical and neuropsychological variables in the patients. Finally, a support vector machine was used to classify the patients from controls.

Results: Compared with the HCs, the patients exhibited topological alterations only in cortical thickness-based networks characterized by higher nodal centralities in parietal (left primary sensory cortex) but lower nodal centralities in temporal (left parabelt complex, right perirhinal ectorhinal cortex, right area PHT and right ventral visual complex) regions. Moreover, decreased nodal centralities of some temporal regions were correlated with cognitive dysfunction and clinical characteristics of the patients. These results were largely reproducible for binary and weighted network analyses. Finally, topological properties of the cortical thickness-based networks were able to distinguish the MDD adolescents from HCs with 87.6% accuracy.

Conclusion: Adolescent MDD is associated with disrupted topological organization of morphological brain networks, and the disruptions provide potential biomarkers for diagnosing and monitoring the disease.

Keywords: adolescent major depressive disorder; cortical thickness; morphological brain network; structural MRI; support vector machine.