Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, UK.
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, UK; Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, London, UK.
Neuroimage. 2017 Aug 1;156:119-127. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.05.024. Epub 2017 May 12.
There is considerable need to develop tailored approaches to psychiatric treatment. Numerous researchers have proposed using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) biomarkers to predict therapeutic response, in particular by measuring task-evoked subgenual anterior cingulate (sgACC) and amygdala activation in mood and anxiety disorders. Translating this to the clinic relies on the assumption that blood-oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) responses in these regions are stable within individuals. To test this assumption, we scanned a group of 29 volunteers twice (mean test-retest interval=14.3 days) and calculated the within-subject reliability of the amplitude of the amygdalae and sgACC BOLD responses to emotional faces using three paradigms: emotion identification; emotion matching; and gender classification. We also calculated the reliability of activation in a control region, the right fusiform face area (FFA). All three tasks elicited robust group activations in the amygdalae and sgACC (which changed little on average over scanning sessions), but within-subject reliability was surprisingly low, despite excellent reliability in the control right FFA region. Our findings demonstrate low statistical reliability of two important putative treatment biomarkers in mood and anxiety disorders.
非常有必要开发针对精神疾病治疗的定制方法。许多研究人员提出使用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）生物标志物来预测治疗反应，特别是通过测量情绪和焦虑障碍患者任务诱发的扣带回前侧(subgenual anterior cingulate, sgACC)和杏仁核的激活。将其转化为临床实践依赖于一个假设，即这些区域的血氧水平依赖（blood-oxygen-level dependent, BOLD）反应在个体内部是稳定的。为了检验这一假设，我们对 29 名志愿者进行了两次扫描（平均测试-重测间隔为 14.3 天），并使用三种范式（情绪识别、情绪匹配和性别分类）计算了杏仁核和 sgACC 的 BOLD 反应幅度的个体内可靠性：情绪识别；情绪匹配；性别分类。我们还计算了控制区域——右侧梭状回面孔区（fusiform face area, FFA）的激活可靠性。所有三种任务都在杏仁核和 sgACC 中引发了强烈的群体激活（在扫描过程中平均变化很小），但个体内可靠性却出人意料地低，尽管在控制右侧 FFA 区域的可靠性非常高。我们的研究结果表明，在情绪和焦虑障碍中，两个重要的潜在治疗生物标志物的统计学可靠性较低。
