Altered resting-state network connectivity in panic disorder: an independent ComponentAnalysis.

Abstract

Panic disorder (PD) is a prevalent anxiety disorder but its neurobiology remains poorly understood. It has been proposed that the pathophysiology of PD is related to an abnormality in a particular neural network. However, most studies investigating resting-state functional connectivity (FC) have relied on a priori restrictions of seed regions, which may bias observations. This study investigated changes in intra and internetwork FC in the whole brain of patients with PD using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. A voxel-wise data-driven independent component analysis was performed on 26 PD patients and 27 healthy controls (HCs).We compared the differences in the intra and internetwork FC between the two groups of subjects using statistical parametric mapping with two-sample t-tests. PD patients exhibited decreased intra-network FC in the right anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) of the anterior default mode network, the left precentral and postcentral gyrus of the sensorimotor network, the right lobule V/VI, the cerebellum vermis, and the left lobule VI of the cerebellum network compared with the HCs. The intra-network FC in the right ACC was negatively correlated with symptom severity. None of the pairs of resting state networks showed significant differences in functional network connectivity between the two groups. These results suggest that the brain networks associated with emotion regulation, interoceptive awareness, and fear and somatosensory processing may play an important role in the pathophysiology of PD.