Altered spontaneous activity and effective connectivity of the anterior cingulate cortex in obsessive–compulsive disorder

Abstract

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a disabling neuropsychiatric disorder whose neurobiological basis remains unclear. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies have reported functional and structural alterations of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in OCD. In this study, we explored the functional activity of subregions of the ACC and effective connectivity (EC) between ACC subregions and the whole brain in OCD. We used a Granger causality analysis (GCA) to identify the direction of information flow and whether the impact of that flow was excitatory or inhibitory. We performed resting-state functional MRI in 31 patients with OCD and 36 healthy controls and analyzed the amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (ALFF) and coefficient-based GCA. The left pregenual ACC (pACC) in patients with OCD showed decreased ALFF relative to controls. There was significantly decreased excitatory output from the left pACC to both right dorsal superior frontal gyrus (dSFG) and left precuneus in patients compared with controls. Patients also had decreased inhibitory input to left pACC from left ventral SFG and left thalamus and caudate relative to controls. Results were similar in drug-naive patients and those with prior but not current psychopharmacological treatment. In patients, path coefficients of GCA from left pACC to right dSFG showed significant negative correlations with obsession and anxiety ratings. Decreased spontaneous neural activity and altered EC of pACC with widely distributed cortical circuitry, and associations with clinical ratings highlight the importance of pACC functional alteration in OCD.

Altered brain functional network dynamics in obsessive–compulsive disorder

“…All participants were right‐handed (Table 1). Some of the rfMRI data used in the present study have been used in a recently published paper focusing on altered effective anterior cingulate connectivity in OCD (Long et al, 2020).…”

Inhibitory control in obsessive compulsive disorder: A systematic review and activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging studies

“…The dACC and PFC, together with striatum, represent key nodes of functionally segregated parallel fronto-striatal circuits ( Alexander et al, 1986 ), which converging lines of evidence have implicated in the pathophysiology of OCD ( Burguière et al, 2015 , Jahanshahi et al, 2015 , Pauls et al, 2014 ). The functional role of the dACC during inhibitory control remains to be fully elucidated ( Long et al, 2021 ), but it is likely involved in an error-processing circuit which monitors performance and signals frontal executive control regions to adjust the selection of actions upon detection of errors ( Kerns, 2006 ). Interestingly, a recent meta -analysis of 10 inhibitory control tasks that concurrently included both an error and an inhibition contrast found error-related hyperactivation of the dACC, but inhibition-related hypoactivation of the same region ( Norman et al, 2019 ).…”

Astrocytic thrombospondins 1 and 2 are required for cortical synapse development controlling instrumental performance

“…Synapse formation and plasticity are critical for the proper development of neural networks that underlie cognition, learning, and memory [1][2][3][4][5]. Synaptic dysfunctions are linked to disorders associated with altered cognition, such as autism spectrum disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and schizophrenia [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. Although synapses are formed between neurons, astrocytes, a glial cell type, play critical roles in developing and remodeling synapses [14][15][16].…”