Functional and structural connectivity of the amygdala in obsessive-compulsive disorder

Abstract

BackgroundThe amygdala is known to be involved in anxiety processing, but its role in the psychopathology of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is still unclear.AimsIn this MRI study we investigated potential alterations in structural and functional connectivity of the amygdala in 42 adult patients with OCD and 37 healthy subjects.MethodPsychophysiological interaction analysis was used to explore amygdala functional connectivity during a negative affective task. Probabilistic tractography was then employed to study structural connectivity and integrity of underlying white matter fiber tracts.ResultsCompared to controls, OCD patients showed a significantly increased functional connectivity of the left amygdala with mostly parieto-occipital regions during task. No structural connectivity differences could be found between the groups. In addition, only patients showed a significant association between functional and structural connectivity of these regions. Moreover, symptom severity was negatively associated with structural integrity of the underlying white matter tracts.ConclusionsPresent results emphasize the relevance of the amygdala for OCD and may reflect that neuronal alterations in structural connectivity could be associated with functional connectivity alterations in broader networks.

Intrinsic functional and structural connectivity of emotion regulation networks in obsessive-compulsive disorder

“…Previous studies in OCD samples, however, have shown disrupted functional and structural connectivity between the amygdala and posterior cortical regions (Rus et al, 2017). Therefore, an alternative explanation for our findings is that disrupted parietolimbic connectivity may be associated with a preferential use of dysfunctional emotional regulation strategies (i.e., suppression).…”

“…Admon et al (2012), using a gambling task, showed a deficit in frontolimbic connectivity both at the functional and structural level, which was also associated with OCD symptom severity. On the other hand, Rus et al (2017) used a negative affect task and found an increased functional connectivity between the amygdala and parieto-occipital regions, which was related to the structural connectivity estimates between these regions, which in turn were negatively associated with OCD symptom severity. To date, however, no studies have investigated multimodal connectivity alterations in OCD in relation with emotion regulation, although, as stated above, this may be underpinned by amygdala networks (Ochsner, Silvers, & Buhle, 2012) and patients with OCD have shown decreased emotion regulation abilities, with difficulties in engaging in cognitive reappraisal strategies (Goldberg et al, 2016).…”

Structural alterations in patients with obsessive–compulsive disorder: a surface-based analysis of cortical volume, surface area and thickness

“…4,21 Functional OCD studies showed alterations in some of these structurally J Psychiatry Neurosci 2017;42(6) altered regions during tasks that required visual, emotional or executive processing; inhibitory control; or working memory processing. [44][45][46][47][48][49][50] Moreover, behavioural OCD studies also reported impairments in functions that are known to involve similar brain regions and networks. 51,52 Furthermore, the alteration in surface area in the bilateral posterior cingulate goes in line with resting-state studies of functional connectivity in OCD samples.…”

Impaired structural connectivity between dorsal attention network and pulvinar mediates the impact of premature birth on adult visual–spatial abilities

“…The output of this transformation procedure was an individual native to standard (MNI space) nonlinear warp field. As a previously used step of normalization, the resulting individual streamline maps were divided by the total number of generated tracts of each individual tractography ("waytotal"), taking into account the high intersubject variability of these tracts as well as ROI-sizes(Arnold et al, 2012;Rus et al, 2017;Zhang, Snyder, Shimony, Fox, & Raichle, 2010).Based onBehrens et al (2003), a map of thalamic voxels containing information about the probability of connectivity with the DAN was extracted for each subject. This individual diffusion-tonative transformation matrix was combined with the above described native-to-standard nonlinear transformation matrix, that resulted in diffusion-to-standard space transformations and their corresponding inverses.…”