Dystonia is a brain disorder characterized by sustained involuntary muscle contractions. It is typically inherited as an autosomal dominant trait with incomplete penetrance. While lacking clear degenerative neuropathology, primary dystonia is thought to involve microstructural and functional changes in neuronal circuitry. In the current study, we used magnetic resonance diffusion tensor imaging and probabilistic tractography to identify the specific circuit abnormalities that underlie clinical penetrance in carriers of genetic mutations for this disorder. This approach revealed reduced integrity of cerebellothalamocortical fiber tracts, likely developmental in origin, in both manifesting and clinically nonmanifesting dystonia mutation carriers. In these subjects, reductions in cerebellothalamic connectivity correlated with increased motor activation responses, consistent with loss of inhibition at the cortical level. Nonmanifesting mutation carriers were distinguished by an additional area of fiber tract disruption situated distally along the thalamocortical segment of the pathway, in tandem with the proximal cerebellar outflow abnormality. In individual gene carriers, clinical penetrance was determined by the difference in connectivity measured at these two sites. Overall, these findings point to a novel mechanism to explain differences in clinical expression in carriers of genes for brain disease.

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The number of ECT sessions and electrode placement impacts the extent and laterality of hippocampal enlargement, but volume change is not positively associated with clinical outcome. The results suggest that the high efficacy of ECT is not explained by hippocampal enlargement, which alone might not serve as a viable biomarker for treatment outcome.

Objective Clinical response to antipsychotic drug treatment is highly variable, yet prognostic biomarkers are lacking. The authors recently demonstrated that successful antipsychotic drug treatment alters resting-state functional connectivity of the striatum. The goal of the present study was to test whether intrinsic striatal connectivity patterns provide prognostic information and can serve as a potential biomarker of treatment response to antipsychotic drugs. Method The authors used resting-state functional MRI (fMRI) to develop a prognostic index in a discovery cohort of 41 first-episode schizophrenia patients, then tested this index in an independent cohort of 40 newly hospitalized chronic patients with acute psychosis. In the discovery cohort, patients underwent resting-state fMRI scanning at the initiation of randomized controlled treatment with a second-generation antipsychotic. Whole-brain functional connectivity maps were generated for each subject from striatal seed regions. A stringent measure of clinical response was calculated that required sustained improvement over two consecutive study visits. Clinical response was entered into a survival analysis, and Cox regression was applied to the functional connectivity data. A striatal connectivity index was created, comprising functional connections of the striatum that predicted treatment response. This striatal connectivity index was tested on a generalizability cohort of patients with psychotic disorders who were hospitalized for an acute psychotic episode. Results A total of 91 regions functionally connected with the striatum provided significant prognostic information. Connectivity in these regions was used to create a baseline striatal connectivity index that predicted response to antipsychotic treatment with high sensitivity and specificity in both the discovery and generalizability cohorts. Conclusions These results provide evidence that individual differences in striatal functional connectivity predict response to antipsychotic drug treatment in acutely psychotic patients. With further development, this has the potential to serve as a prognostic biomarker with clinical utility and to reduce the overall burden associated with psychotic illnesses.

Primary dystonia has traditionally been viewed as a basal ganglia disorder, but recent studies suggest that the cerebellum plays a crucial role in the disease. Primary dystonia is associated with several genotypes. Among those, DYT1 and DYT6 are inherited in autosomal dominant fashion with reduced penetrance. Extensive structural and functional imaging studies have been performed on manifesting and non-manifesting carriers of these mutations. The results suggest that primary dystonia can be viewed as a neurodevelopmental circuit disorder, involving the cortico-striatopallido-thalamo-cortical and cerebello-thalamo-cortical pathways. Anatomical disruption of the cerebellar outflow is found in non-manifesting and manifesting mutation carriers, and a second downstream disruption in thalamo-cortical projections appears clinically protective in nonmanifesting carriers. The microstructural deficits in cerebellar outflow are linked to an abnormally elevated sensorimotor network (NMRP) in dystonia patients. Abnormal expression of this network is reduced by successful treatment with deep brain stimulation.

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is used extensively in neuroscience to noninvasively estimate white matter (WM) microarchitecture. However, the diffusion signal is inherently ambiguous because it infers WM structure from the orientation of water diffusion and cannot identify the biological sources of diffusion changes. To compare inferred WM estimates to directly labeled axonal elements, we performed a novel within-subjects combination of high-resolution ex vivo DTI with two-photon laser microscopy of intact mouse brains rendered optically transparent by Clear Lipid-exchanged, Anatomically Rigid, Imaging/immunostaining compatible, Tissue hYdrogel (CLARITY). We found that myelin basic protein (MBP) immunofluorescence significantly correlated with fractional anisotropy (FA), especially in WM regions with coherent fiber orientations and low fiber dispersion. Our results provide evidence that FA is particularly sensitive to myelination in WM regions with these characteristics. Furthermore, we found that radial diffusivity (RD) was only sensitive to myelination in a subset of WM tracts, suggesting that the association of RD with myelin should be used cautiously. This combined DTI-CLARITY approach illustrates, for the first time, a framework for using brain-wide immuno-labeling of WM targets to elucidate the relationship between the diffusion signal and its biological underpinnings. This study also demonstrates the feasibility of a within-subject combination of noninvasive neuroimaging and tissue clearing techniques that has broader implications for neuroscience research.

The factors that determine symptom penetrance in inherited disease are poorly understood. Increasingly, magnetic resonance diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and PET are used to separate alterations in brain structure and function that are linked to disease symptomatology from those linked to gene carrier status. One example is DYT1 dystonia, a dominantly inherited movement disorder characterized by sustained muscle contractions, postures, and/or involuntary movements. This form of dystonia is caused by a 3-bp deletion (i.e., ΔE) in the TOR1A gene that encodes torsinA. Carriers of the DYT1 dystonia mutation, even if clinically nonpenetrant, exhibit abnormalities in cerebellothalamocortical (CbTC) motor pathways. However, observations in human gene carriers may be confounded by variability in genetic background and age. To address this problem, we implemented a unique multimodal imaging strategy in a congenic line of DYT1 mutant mice that contain the ΔE mutation in the endogenous mouse torsinA allele (i.e., DYT1 knock-in). Heterozygous knock-in mice and littermate controls underwent micro-PET followed by ex vivo high-field DTI and tractographic analysis. Mutant mice, which do not display abnormal movements, exhibited significant CbTC tract changes as well as abnormalities in brainstem regions linking cerebellar and basal ganglia motor circuits highly similar to those identified in human nonmanifesting gene carriers. Moreover, metabolic activity in the sensorimotor cortex of these animals was closely correlated with individual measures of CbTC pathway integrity. These findings further link a selective brain circuit abnormality to gene carrier status and demonstrate that DYT1 mutant torsinA has similar effects in mice and humans.connectivity | regional metabolism | brain networks I n recent years, advanced imaging technologies such as PET and magnetic resonance diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) have provided unique information regarding the impact of specific genetic mutations on brain structure and function. However, to control for variability in genetic background and additional confounders such as age and sex, many more mutation carriers (and control subjects) are required than can conveniently be scanned, even in a multicenter design. Human imaging studies may also suffer from relatively low spatial resolution and sensitivity. These considerations motivated the current study in which high field magnetic resonance DTI was performed ex vivo in an experimental genetic model of a brain disorder.Primary dystonia is a childhood-onset neurological illness characterized by disabling abnormal involuntary movements without consistent brain lesions on routine structural brain imaging or at postmortem analysis (1). This disorder is associated with several genotypes (2). DYT1 dystonia, the most common inherited form of the disease, is caused by a dominantly inherited 3-bp in-frame deletion in the TOR1A gene that removes a single glutamic acid (ΔE) from the torsinA protein (3). This lowprevalence mutation (approximately 1 in 30,000...

BACKGROUND: Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is associated with volumetric enlargements of corticolimbic brain regions. However, the pattern of whole-brain structural alterations following ECT remains unresolved. Here, we examined the longitudinal effects of ECT on global and local variations in gray matter, white matter, and ventricle volumes in patients with major depressive disorder as well as predictors of ECT-related clinical response. METHODS: Longitudinal magnetic resonance imaging and clinical data from the Global ECT-MRI Research Collaboration (GEMRIC) were used to investigate changes in white matter, gray matter, and ventricle volumes before and after ECT in 328 patients experiencing a major depressive episode. In addition, 95 nondepressed control subjects were scanned twice. We performed a mega-analysis of single subject data from 14 independent GEMRIC sites. RESULTS: Volumetric increases occurred in 79 of 84 gray matter regions of interest. In total, the cortical volume increased by mean 6 SD of 1.04 6 1.03% (Cohen's d = 1.01, p , .001) and the subcortical gray matter volume increased by 1.47 6 1.05% (d = 1.40, p , .001) in patients. The subcortical gray matter increase was negatively associated with total ventricle volume (Spearman's rank correlation r = 2.44, p , .001), while total white matter volume remained unchanged (d = 20.05, p = .41). The changes were modulated by number of ECTs and mode of electrode placements. However, the gray matter volumetric enlargements were not associated with clinical outcome. CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest that ECT induces gray matter volumetric increases that are broadly distributed. However, gross volumetric increases of specific anatomically defined regions may not serve as feasible biomarkers of clinical response.