Early brain changes associated with psychotherapy in major depressive disorder revealed by resting-state fMRI: Evidence for the top-down regulation theory

Functional neuroimaging of psychotherapeutic processes in anxiety and depression

“…Similarly, resting-state regional homogeneity -a measure of the similarity between a voxel and its direct neighbors -in the ventromedial PFC and the ACC increased after five weeks of guided imagery therapy [33]. Wiswede et al [34] showed pretreatment hyperactivity in limbic and subcortical regions to normalize after psychodynamic therapy, whereas Sankar et al [35] showed that patients who had the greatest symptom change following CBT displayed the strongest increase in left precentral gyrus activity during processing of dysfunctional attitudes.…”

“…Huang et al [33] reported that higher pretreatment regional homogeneity in the dorsal ACC was positively correlated with an improved response to guided imagery therapy. Yoshimura ] showed subcallosal cingulate metabolism measured using PET to be higher in nonresponders than in remitters.…”

“…It has to be noted, however, that results are not always consistent [14 & ,15] and disorder-specific activation patterns should be anticipated that may differ between typical 'fear-circuity' (e.g., specific phobia) versus 'anxious-misery' (e.g., GAD) nosologies [24]. In depression, the majority of recent findings support the notion of stronger prefrontal 'top-down' mechanisms induced by psychotherapy [32, 33,35], although others also found reduction in limbic brain activation [34]. Neuroplastic mechanisms of psychotherapy show overlap with recent meta-analytic findings on prefrontal under-and limbic overactivation in depression [47].…”

Altered regional homogeneity of prefrontal cortex in Parkinson’s disease with mild cognitive impairment

“…Unlike the functional connectivity, ReHo reflects the local features of brain activity in the resting state rather than the synchronization of activity between remote brain regions. To date, ReHo method has been extensively used to explore the alterations of functional activity in many neurological and psychiatric disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease [15], Schizophrenia [16,17], depression [18,19], and primary insomnia [20]. Likewise, this process has also been used to determine PD-related patterns of neural activity in the resting state [10,11].…”

Abnormal regional homogeneity and its correlations with personality in first-episode, treatment-naive somatization disorder

“…Abnormal ReHo may indicate the disruption of temporal aspects of neural activity (He et al, 2007) and is associated with the pathophysiology of psychiatric disorders (Liu et al, 2010). The ReHo approach was well applied in psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, ADHD and depression (Cao et al, 2006;Chen et al, 2012;Guo et al, 2011a,b;Huang et al, 2014;Liu et al, 2006;Wu et al, 2011;Yao et al, 2009). However, no study is conducted in patients with SD using the ReHo method.…”