Department of Psychiatry, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan.
Division of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taipei, Taiwan.
J Neurosci Res. 2024 Oct;102(10):e25388. doi: 10.1002/jnr.25388.
Thalamocortical connectivity is associated with cognitive and affective processing. The role of thalamocortical connectivity in the pathomechanism of treatment-resistant depression (TRD) remains unclear. This study included 48 patients with TRD and 48 healthy individuals. We investigated thalamocortical connectivity by performing resting-state functional MRI with the bilateral thalamus as the seed. In addition, patients with TRD were evaluated using the Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS). Compared with the healthy individuals, the patients with TRD exhibited increased functional connectivity (FC) of the thalamus with the insula and superior temporal cortex and reduced the FC of the thalamus with the anterior paracingulate cortex and cerebellum crus II. Our study may support the crucial role of thalamocortical dysconnectivity in the TRD pathomechanism. However, the small sample size may limit the statistical power. A future study with a large sample size of patients with TRD would be required to validate our findings.
丘脑皮质连接与认知和情感处理有关。丘脑皮质连接在治疗抵抗性抑郁症（TRD）的发病机制中的作用尚不清楚。本研究纳入了 48 例 TRD 患者和 48 名健康个体。我们通过以双侧丘脑为种子进行静息态功能磁共振成像来研究丘脑皮质连接。此外，我们还使用蒙哥马利-Åsberg 抑郁评定量表（MADRS）对 TRD 患者进行评估。与健康个体相比，TRD 患者的丘脑与岛叶和颞上皮质的功能连接增加，而丘脑与前扣带回皮质和小脑 crus II 的功能连接减少。我们的研究可能支持丘脑皮质连接异常在 TRD 发病机制中的关键作用。然而，小样本量可能限制了统计效力。需要对更多的 TRD 患者进行大样本量的研究来验证我们的发现。
