Changes in regional cerebral blood flow demonstrated by 99mTc-HMPAO SPECT in euthymic bipolar patients

Abstract

Single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) with 99mTc-HMPAO was used to compare regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) in patients with bipolar disorder and in healthy controls. The sample of this study consisted of 16 euthymic bipolar patients who met the DSM-IV criteria and 10 healthy control subjects. The mean regional cerebral blood flow values of the bipolar euthymic patients were significantly lower than those of the controls in the bilateral medial-basal temporal, occipital; medial frontal; parietal regions and in the cingulate gyrus; the hypoperfusion in the cingulate had the highest significant P value (.001, Bonferroni correction). No significant differences in rCBF emerged between right and left-brain regions. The most important findings of the current study are the presence of regional cerebral perfusion alterations, particularly in the cingulate gyrus in the euthymic bipolar patients. Our results imply that underlying brain dysfunction may be independent from manic or depressive episodes in bipolar disorder. Because of the small number of subjects, however, this finding should be viewed as preliminary.

The use of dynamic susceptibility contrast (DSC) MRI to automatically classify patients with first episode psychosis

“…Also patients with Schizophrenia Research 165 (2015) [38][39][40][41][42][43][44] bipolar disorder have been found to have abnormal perfusion characteristics (Agarwal et al, 2008;Culha et al, 2008;Bhardwaj et al, 2010), suggesting a possible association between cerebral vascular changes and functional psychoses. Detection of hemodynamic changes in early stages of psychosis can therefore elucidate whether they are already present at illness onset, thus representing a potential common neural marker for psychoses.…”

Artificial intelligence approach to classify unipolar and bipolar depressive disorders

“…When compared to unipolar depression, cerebral metabolic changes observed in bipolar disorder were suggested to be more associated with dysregulation of the dorsolateral prefrontal circuit [69] and the anterior cingulate [80]. In a study it was suggested that disrupted baseline metabolic status is reversed by effective treatment [81], but there is also some evidence of a persistence of metabolic abnormalities in euthymic patients [82].…”

Resting State Blood Flow and Glucose Metabolism in Psychiatric Disorders

“…In this context, studies on euthymia will be more and more important for addressing these issues. Some studies on patients with euthymic state compared to normal controls have reported a decrease of rCBF/rGMR in the lateral prefrontal (Culha et al, 2008;Brooks Ⅲ et al, 2009b) and ACC (Culha et al, 2008) at rest, and the lateral prefrontal (Krüger et al, 2003) and OFC (Blumberg et al, 1999;Krüger et al, 2003) during cognitive tasks or symptomprovocation. On the other hand, regions with increased perfusion/metabolism were observed in the subcortical areas such as the amygdala (Brooks Ⅲ et al, 2009b) and parahippocampus (Brooks Ⅲ et al, 2009b) at rest.…”