Characterizing Large-Scale Resting State Effective Connectivity Patterns with Functionally Constrained Priors in Individuals with a History of Major Depressive Disorder

Abstract

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a common mental health condition (Kessler & Bromet, 2013) and the 3rd leading cause of disability worldwide (James et al., 2018). MDD history is a significant risk factor for relapse and recurrence of depression (Buckman et al., 2018; Burcusa & Iacono, 2007). The current study investigated resting state effective connectivity among 13 brain regions from three resting state networks (i.e., default, salience, and central executive), which had been implicated in the pathophysiology of MDD from previous studies (Kaiser et al., 2015; Mulders et al., 2015). In the current study, both within- and between-networks effective connectivity were found to be different in those with a MDD history (N=29) compared to the healthy controls (N=28), through spectral dynamic causal modeling (Friston, Kahan, Biswal, et al., 2014), Bayesian model reduction (Friston et al., 2016), and parametric empirical Bayes (Zeidman, Jafarian, Seghier, et al., 2019) analyses. Of particular interest is the finding that there is more negative effective connectivity from right anterior insula to left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and left inferior parietal lobe in MDD history. Previous studies have found less causal influence from anterior insula to prefrontal cortex in currently depressed individuals (Hyett et al., 2015; Iwabuchi et al., 2014; Kandilarova et al., 2018). Given the importance of anterior insular in interoception and subjective feelings (Craig & Craig, 2009), the current study provides some preliminary evidence that altered effective connectivity between anterior insula and prefrontal cortex may be related to MDD history as well.