Resting-State Functional MRI Study Of Childhood Trauma Associated Major Depressive Disorder

Background:Major depressive disorder (MDD) is one of the most common mental disorders with a lifetime prevalence of16%. The chronic and festering nature of depression lends substantially to the global burden of disease and disability. The World Health Organization has ranked depression as the fourth contributor to the global burden of disease in the year2000and predicted that it would become the second leading contributor by2020. The current view of the etiology of depression is best summarized as the interaction of genetic susceptibility and environmental factors. Childhood maltreatment, a major public-health and social-welfare problem, is one of the major means whereby the environment influences the development of depression. Many studies have suggested that childhood maltreatment increase risk for adulthood major depressive disorder (MDD) and predict its unfavorable treatment outcome, yet the neural underpinnings associated with childhood maltreatment in MDD remain poorly understood.Objective:Here we seek to investigate the whole-brain functional connectivity patterns in MDD patients with childhood trauma by using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging.Methods:Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging was employed to explore intrinsic or spontaneous functional connectivity networks of18MDD patients with childhood neglect,20MDD patients without childhood neglect, and20healthy controls. Whole-brain functional networks were constructed by measuring the temporal correlations of every pairs of brain voxels and were further analyzed by using graph-theory approaches.Results:Relative to the healthy control group, the two MDD patient groups showed overlapping reduced functional connectivity strength in bilateral ventral medial prefrontal cortex/ventral anterior cingulate cortex. However, compared with MDD patients without a history of childhood maltreatment, those patients with such a history displayed widespread reduction of functional connectivity strength primarily in brain regions within the prefrontal-limbic-thalamic-cerebellar circuitry, and these reductions significantly correlated with measures of childhood neglect.Conclusion:Together, we showed that the MDD groups with and without childhood neglect exhibited overlapping and segregated functional connectivity patterns in the whole-brain networks, providing empirical evidence for the contribution of early life stress to the pathophysiology of MDD.