Brain Activity Patterns Of Psychological Intervention:Coordinate-based Meta-analysis Of Brain Functional Images

Background: psychotherapy is one of the accepted treatment modalities for mental disorders.Studies have shown that the use of psychotherapy can improve patients' cognitive structure,belief system,emotional state and behavior.The research on the neural mechanism of psychotherapy has gradually increased in recent years.However,few studies have explored the brain network mechanism of various psychological treatments on mental disorders.The primary reasons for lack of brain network studies may include small sample size in the previous literature,the heterogeneity of brain disorders,and the differences in the criteria of the participants.The combination of meta-analysis and brain functional network can improve the homogeneity and statistical power and provide an effective way to discover the network connection mechanism of psychological treatment for mental illness.Objective: The purpose of this study is to objectively quantify the functional neuroimaging studies of effective psychotherapy through the use of evidence-based medicine theory and methods,to find objective evidence of the efficacy of psychotherapy,and to explore the mechanism of psychotherapy from the perspective of the brain network.Methods: In this study,the criteria for inclusion and exclusion of research literature,database use and retrieval strategies,data extraction were developed in accordance with systematic review methods.The coordinates and sample size were extracted.A meta-analysis was performed by using AES-SDM.Then,the seven-brain network partition proposed by Yeo was used to further investigate the distribution of psychological intervention-related voxels on these brain networks.By comparing the distribution ratio of psychological intervention-related voxels in the seven networks,the brain networks most relevant to psychological intervention were investigated.Results: A total of 30 articles were included,including 10 articles on panic disorder,6 articles on anxiety,4 articles on post-traumatic stress disorder,4 articles on depression,4 articles on special fear,1article on obsessive-compulsive disorder,and 1 article on substance abuse.Totally174 coordinates and 1174 samples were extracted.Some bran areas were found to be related to psychotherapy,including the right inferior frontal gyrus,left anterior cingulate gyrus,left paracingulate gyrus,left superior frontal gyrus,left middle frontal gyrus,right anterior thalamus,right superior frontal gyrus,right middle frontal gyrus,right inferior frontal gyrus,the left frontal gyrus,and the middle frontal gyrus.In addition,we also categorized all voxels significantly activated by psychotherapy into Yeo's 7-network parcellation and calculated the ratio of each of the networks' voxels among all the significant voxels.37% of all voxels that demonstrated rumination-related activation were classified as part of the prefrontal network(PFN),25% for the default mode network(DMN),and the other networks are less than 10%.Conclusion: This study found that psychotherapy can improve the abnormal activities of patients' prefrontal lobe,anterior cingulate gyrus,and brain island.It was also found that the forehead network and the default network are potential neural mechanisms of psychotherapy and have a close relationship with psychotherapy.These two brain networks are involved in several important cognitive processes.This provides an important basis for revealing the underlying neural basis of psychotherapy.