Key Laboratory for NeuroInformation of Ministry of Education, School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 610054, PR China.
Magn Reson Imaging. 2011 Jun;29(5):701-11. doi: 10.1016/j.mri.2011.02.013. Epub 2011 Apr 29.
Dysfunction of the corticolimbic circuitry has been highlighted in social anxiety disorder (SAD) during social stimuli. However, few studies have investigated functional connectivity in SAD during the resting state, which may improve our understanding of SAD pathophysiology. The aim of this study was to investigate whether whole-brain functional connectivity might be aberrant in SAD patients, and if so, whether these changes are related to the measured clinical severity. Seventeen SAD patients and 19 healthy controls participated in resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. The brain was first divided into 90 paired brain regions and functional connectivity was then estimated by temporal correlation between each of these regions. Furthermore, connections that were significantly disrupted in SAD patients were correlated with clinical severity measured using the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale. Compared with healthy controls, SAD patients showed decreased positive connections within the frontal lobe and decreased negative connections between the frontal and occipital lobes. In particular, the weaker negative connections between the frontal lobe, which mainly involved the right median prefrontal cortex, and the occipital lobe had a significant positive correlation with the severity of SAD symptoms. The results support the hypothesis that some abnormalities of functional connectivity exist in SAD patients, which relate to the frontal cortex and occipital cortex. In addition, decreased functional connectivity between the frontal and occipital lobes and within the frontal lobe might be related to abnormal information processing and reflect disturbed neural organization resulting in defective social cognition, which could represent an early imaging biomarker for SAD.
皮质边缘回路功能障碍在社交焦虑障碍（SAD）患者面对社交刺激时已经被突出强调。然而，很少有研究调查 SAD 患者在静息状态下的功能连接，这可能有助于我们更好地理解 SAD 的病理生理学。本研究旨在调查 SAD 患者的全脑功能连接是否存在异常，如果存在，这些变化是否与测量的临床严重程度有关。17 名 SAD 患者和 19 名健康对照者参与了静息态功能磁共振成像。首先，大脑被分为 90 对脑区，然后通过这些脑区之间的时间相关性来估计功能连接。此外，在 SAD 患者中显著中断的连接与使用 Liebowitz 社交焦虑量表测量的临床严重程度相关。与健康对照组相比，SAD 患者的额叶内正连接减少，额叶和枕叶之间的负连接减少。特别是，额叶和枕叶之间较弱的负连接与 SAD 症状的严重程度呈显著正相关，主要涉及右侧中前额皮质。研究结果支持这样一种假设，即在 SAD 患者中存在一些功能连接异常，这些异常与额叶和枕叶有关。此外，额叶和枕叶之间以及额叶内的功能连接减少可能与异常的信息处理有关，反映了神经组织紊乱导致社交认知缺陷，这可能代表 SAD 的早期影像学生物标志物。
