Department of Psychology, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
Depress Anxiety. 2021 May;38(5):508-520. doi: 10.1002/da.23143. Epub 2021 Mar 5.
A family history of major depressive disorder (MDD) increases the likelihood of a future depressive episode, which itself poses a significant risk for disruptions in reward processing and social cognition. However, it is unclear whether a family history of MDD is associated with alterations in the neural circuitry underlying reward processing and social cognition.
We subdivided 279 participants from the Human Connectome Project into three groups: 71 with a lifetime history of MDD, 103 with a family history (FH) of MDD, and 105 healthy controls (HCs). We then evaluated task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging data on a social cognition and a reward processing task and found a region of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) that responded to both tasks, independent of the group. To investigate whether the vmPFC shows alterations in functional connectivity between groups, we conducted psychophysiological interaction analyses using the vmPFC as a seed region.
We found that FH (relative to HC) was associated with increased sadness scores, and MDD (relative to both FH and HC) was associated with increased sadness and MDD symptoms. Additionally, the FH group had increased vmPFC functional connectivity within the nucleus accumbens, left dorsolateral PFC, and subregions of the cerebellum relative to HC during the social cognition task.
These findings suggest that aberrant neural mechanisms among those with a familial risk of MDD may underlie vulnerability to altered social cognition.
重度抑郁症（MDD）的家族史增加了未来发生抑郁发作的可能性，而抑郁发作本身就存在破坏奖励处理和社会认知的重大风险。然而，目前尚不清楚 MDD 的家族史是否与奖励处理和社会认知的神经回路改变有关。
我们将人类连接组计划中的 279 名参与者分为三组：71 名有 MDD 病史，103 名有 MDD 家族史，105 名健康对照组。然后，我们评估了基于任务的功能磁共振成像数据，涉及社会认知和奖励处理任务，并发现了腹内侧前额皮质（vmPFC）的一个区域，该区域对两个任务都有反应，而与组无关。为了研究 vmPFC 在功能连接方面是否存在组间变化，我们使用 vmPFC 作为种子区域进行了心理生理交互分析。
我们发现，与健康对照组相比，家族史组（相对于健康对照组）的悲伤评分增加，而 MDD 组（相对于家族史组和健康对照组）的悲伤和 MDD 症状增加。此外，家族史组在社会认知任务中，vmPFC 与伏隔核、左侧背外侧前额叶和小脑亚区的功能连接增加。
这些发现表明，MDD 家族风险人群中异常的神经机制可能是导致社会认知改变的易感性的基础。
