Abstract
ObjectiveThe occurrence of death by suicide in patients diagnosed with bipolar disorder is as much as 60 times greater than in the general population. Even during the state of euthymia patients are characterized by suicide risk. The aim of the study is to investigate the baseline brain activity in euthymic bipolar disorder patients in regard to suicide risk. We hypothesized that patients compared to healthy control group will demonstrate altered functional connectivity among resting state networks which will be directly related to current suicide risk.Method41 subjects were enrolled in the study consisting control group (n = 21) and euthymic bipolar disorder patients group (n = 20). Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to evaluate resting state brain activity and ROI–ROI functional connectivity analysis was performed. Suicidal risk was estimated using The Suicide Behaviors Questionnaire-Revised.ResultsA two sample t-test revealed decreased functional connectivity between regions involved in the salience network in patients compared to the control group. This decrease was negatively correlated with current suicide risk.ConclusionObtained results suggest the association between risk of suicide and activity of regions responsible for functions such as learning from mistakes, prospective thinking, and sensory integration.
Highlights
It is estimated that one million suicides are committed each year (Sears et al, 2013; World Health Organization (WHO), 2016)
Our objective is to examine baseline brain activity associated with suicide behaviors among euthymic Bipolar disorder (BD) patients in comparison with healthy controls (HCs)
We formulated two hypothesis: (1) euthymic BD patients when compared to HCs will demonstrate altered functional connectivity in default mode network (DMN), and the FC values will be significantly correlated with the severity of suicidal risk, and (2) the euthymic BD patients hen compared to HCs will display altered functional connectivity in the salience network (SN) and the FC values will be significantly correlated with the severity of suicidal risk
Summary
It is estimated that one million suicides are committed each year (Sears et al, 2013; World Health Organization (WHO), 2016). Further studies point on the fact that the altered activity of the regions involved in DMN and SN networks are associated with the suicide risk in mood disorders (Malhi et al, 2019b; Schwartz et al, 2019). Alterations to SN activity are considered to have clinical consequences (Uddin, 2016) and in the recent study Gong et al (2019) revealed decreased functional connectivity of the SN in BD patients compared to HCs. New studies (Van Heeringen, 2018; Malhi et al, 2019a) promote getting more knowledge about neurobiology of suicide related behaviors in order to identify specific biomarkers that could inform efforts to prevent suicide. We formulated two hypothesis: (1) euthymic BD patients when compared to HCs will demonstrate altered functional connectivity in DMN, and the FC values will be significantly correlated with the severity of suicidal risk, and (2) the euthymic BD patients hen compared to HCs will display altered functional connectivity in the SN and the FC values will be significantly correlated with the severity of suicidal risk
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