Partly recovery and compensation in anterior cingulate cortex after SSRI treatment-evidence from multi-voxel pattern analysis over resting state fMRI in depression

Background: Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) plays an essential role in the pathophysiology of major depressive disorder (MDD) and its treatment. However, it's still unclear whether the effects of disease and antidepressant treatment on ACC perform diversely in neural mechanisms.Methods: Fifty-nine MDD patients completed resting-state fMRI scanning twice at baseline and after 12-week selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) treatment, respectively in acute state and remission state. Fifty-nine demographically matched healthy controls were enrolled. Using fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (fALFF) in ACC as features, we performed multi-voxel pattern analysis over pretreatment MDD pa-tients vs health control (HC), and over pretreatment MDD patients vs posttreatment MDD patients.Results: Discriminative regions in ACC for MDD impairment and changes after antidepressants were obtained. The intersection set and difference set were calculated to form ACC subregions of recovered, unrecovered and compensative, respectively. The recovered ACC subregion mainly distributed in rostral ACC (80 %) and the other two subregions had nearly equal distribution over dorsal ACC and rostral ACC. Furthermore, only the compensative subregion had significant changed functional connectivity with cingulo-opercular control network (CON) after antidepressant treatment. Limitations: The number of subjects was relatively small. The results need to be validated with larger sample sizes and multisite data. Conclusions: This finding suggested that the local function of ACC was partly recovered on regulating emotion after antidepressant by detecting the common subregional targets of depression impairment and antidepressive effect. Besides, changed fALFF in the compensative ACC subregion and its connectivity with CON may partly compensate for the cognition deficits.

Automated summary

This study found that antidepressant treatment partially recovers the local function of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in regulating emotion by detecting common subregional targets of depression impairment and antidepressant effects. Additionally, changes in fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (fALFF) in the compensative ACC subregion and its connectivity with the cingulo-opercular control network (CON) may partly compensate for cognitive deficits.