Aberrant functional brain connectome in people with antisocial personality disorder

Abstract

Antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) is characterised by a disregard for social obligations and callous unconcern for the feelings of others. Studies have demonstrated that ASPD is associated with abnormalities in brain regions and aberrant functional connectivity. In this paper, topological organisation was examined in resting-state fMRI data obtained from 32 ASPD patients and 32 non-ASPD controls. The frequency-dependent functional networks were constructed using wavelet-based correlations over 90 brain regions. The topology of the functional networks of ASPD subjects was analysed via graph theoretical analysis. Furthermore, the abnormal functional connectivity was determined with a network-based statistic (NBS) approach. Our results revealed that, compared with the controls, the ASPD patients exhibited altered topological configuration of the functional connectome in the frequency interval of 0.016–0.031 Hz, as indicated by the increased clustering coefficient and decreased betweenness centrality in the medial superior frontal gyrus, precentral gyrus, Rolandic operculum, superior parietal gyrus, angular gyrus, and middle temporal pole. In addition, the ASPD patients showed increased functional connectivity mainly located in the default-mode network. The present study reveals an aberrant topological organisation of the functional brain network in individuals with ASPD. Our findings provide novel insight into the neuropathological mechanisms of ASPD.

Aggression Subtypes Relate to Distinct Resting State Functional Connectivity in Disruptive Children and Adolescents

“…In line with rsFC studies in adolescents (Aghajani et al, 2016(Aghajani et al, , 2017Cohn et al, 2015) and adults (Philippi et al, 2015;Tang et al, 2016), cases exhibited increases in rsFC with higher CU traits. Callousness and uncaring behavior were related to rsFC patterns including clusters in the precentral gyrus, which has been previously linked to altered rsFC in adolescents with CU-related traits (Cohn et al, 2015;Pu et al, 2017) and psychopathic adults (Espinoza et al, 2018;Korponay et al, 2017;Philippi et al, 2015;Tang et al, 2016). A recent meta-analytic review found that the right anterior insula was implicated in the evaluation of feelings and the left anterior insula in the expression of anger (Lindquist, Wager, Kober, Bliss-Moreau, & Barrett, 2012).…”

“…The DMN seed-based rsFC patterns reported here might suggest uncaring and callousness dimension-specific alterations in (affective) selfreferential processes (Andrews-Hanna et al, 2010). Altered rsFC in the DMN was reported in children and adolescents with CU-related traits (Cohn et al, 2015;Pu et al, 2017) and in adult psychopathy (Pujol et al, 2012;Tang, Jiang, Liao, Wang, & Luo, 2013;Tang et al, 2016). The overlapping SN rsFC with a cluster in precuneal and cingulate areas for uncaring and unemotional behavior scores may reflect their behavioral correlation (Kimonis et al, 2008).…”

“…These regions have been linked to emotion, empathy, moral, and self-referential processes which are impaired in youth with disruptive behaviors (Blair, Veroude, & Buitelaar, 2016). In line with rsFC studies in adolescents (Aghajani et al, 2016(Aghajani et al, , 2017Cohn et al, 2015) and adults (Philippi et al, 2015;Tang et al, 2016), cases exhibited increases in rsFC with higher CU traits. Callousness and uncaring behavior were related to rsFC patterns including clusters in the precentral gyrus, which has been previously linked to altered rsFC in adolescents with CU-related traits (Cohn et al, 2015;Pu et al, 2017) and psychopathic adults (Espinoza et al, 2018;Korponay et al, 2017;Philippi et al, 2015;Tang et al, 2016).…”

Combining Disrupted and Discriminative Topological Properties of Functional Connectivity Networks as Neuroimaging Biomarkers for Accurate Diagnosis of Early Tourette Syndrome Children

“…This showed that betweenness centrality was a more effective parameter since the hub's vulnerability of betweenness centrality method was larger than other methods and the consistency was better. Specifically, betweenness centrality was indeed widely used for hub analysis of brain functional networks [54,14,55], and our study built on these foundations to study the hubs in the FC network.…”

Localization of Epileptic Seizure Focus by Computerized Analysis of fMRI Recordings

“…Functionally connected elements of the brain exhibit similar spontaneous BOLD signal fluctuations at rest (Biswal et al, 1997), which enables one to capture interactions between brain regions in vivo. Within the network framework, the brain is represented as a graph, a mathematical construct consisting of a set of nodes connected by edges (Grayson et al, 2017;Hagmann et al, 2008;Supekar et al, 2013;Tang et al, 2016). The nodes are defined as anatomical regions of the brain; the edge between each pair of nodes is estimated as the magnitude of association between their BOLD time series (Hagmann et al, 2008;Magalhaes et al, 2015;Paldino et al, 2019;Rubinov et al, 2010;Zalesky et al, 2010).…”