Well-being is associated with cortical thickness network topology of human brain

Abstract

Background Living a happy and meaningful life is an eternal topic in positive psychology, which is crucial for individuals’ physical and mental health as well as social functioning. Well-being can be subdivided into pleasure attainment related hedonic well-being or emotional well-being, and self-actualization related eudaimonic well-being or psychological well-being plus social well-being. Previous studies have mostly focused on human brain morphological and functional mechanisms underlying different dimensions of well-being, but no study explored brain network mechanisms of well-being, especially in terms of topological properties of human brain morphological similarity network. Methods Therefore, in the study, we collected 65 datasets including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and well-being data, and constructed human brain morphological network based on morphological distribution similarity of cortical thickness to explore the correlations between topological properties including network efficiency and centrality and different dimensions of well-being. Results We found emotional well-being was negatively correlated with betweenness centrality in the visual network but positively correlated with eigenvector centrality in the precentral sulcus, while the total score of well-being was positively correlated with local efficiency in the posterior cingulate cortex of cortical thickness network. Conclusions Our findings demonstrated that different dimensions of well-being corresponded to different cortical hierarchies: hedonic well-being was involved in more preliminary cognitive processing stages including perceptual and attentional information processing, while hedonic and eudaimonic well-being might share common morphological similarity network mechanisms in the subsequent advanced cognitive processing stages.

Tryptophan Metabolism in Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD)

“…Early life adversity has been associated with adult mood disorders [81][82][83]. The gene-environment relationship has been explored in the action of the serotonergic system on depression, with several studies reporting the polymorphisms of genes in this system associated with this mood disorder [84][85][86][87]. One landmark and widely cited study described the effect of early life adversity, moderated by the polymorphism of the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTT), in triggering the risk of depression [84].…”

“…The study found that the TPH2 gene polymorphism may play a role in early adversity, using magnetic resonance imaging to measure cortical volume. This affects anxiety behaviour, which is mediated by the volume of the cerebral grey matter of the right thalamus (right posterior parietal thalamus (RPPTha) and the parahippocampal gyrus [87]. In 2014, the first study linking early adversity with expression of genes for 5-HTT and TPH2 to depression was conducted and found that this interaction is associated with reduced synaptic serotonin and increased depressive symptoms [86].…”