Amygdala activation is associated with prefrontal cortical thickness in healthy subjects, but not in euthymic bipolar patients

Abstract

Introduction: Bipolar (BP) disorder is a severe chronic mental illness characterized by dramatic mood swings between mania and depression. Several lines of evidence have implicated disruptions of prefrontal cortex and amygdala, known components of an emotion regulatory network. Recent data from our group have shown such a disruption occurs during an emotion identification task in bipolar mania (Foland et al., 2008). Here, we use the same task to examine (1) if amygdala hyper-responsivity persists during euthymia, and (2) whether amygdala hyper-responsivity is associated with a reduction in prefrontal cortical (PFC) gray matter thickness, given that the PFC directly suppresses amygdala output (Hariri et al., 2000).