Abstract
Suicide is one of the leading causes of mortality worldwide. Various factors could lead to suicidal ideation (SI), while depression is the predominant cause among all mental disorders. Studies have shown that alterations in brain structures and networks may be highly associated with suicidality. This study investigated both neurological structural variations and network alterations in depressed patients with suicidal ideation by using generalized q-sampling imaging (GQI) and Graph Theoretical Analysis (GTA). This study recruited 155 participants and divided them into three groups: 44 depressed patients with suicidal ideation (SI+; 20 males and 24 females with mean age = 42, SD = 12), 56 depressed patients without suicidal ideation (Depressed; 24 males and 32 females with mean age = 45, SD = 11) and 55 healthy controls (HC; nine males and 46 females with mean age = 39, SD = 11). Both the generalized fractional anisotropy (GFA) and normalized quantitative anisotropy (NQA) values were evaluated in a voxel-based statistical analysis by GQI. We analyzed different topological parameters in the graph theoretical analysis and the subnetwork interconnections in the Network-based Statistical (NBS) analysis. In the voxel-based statistical analysis, both the GFA and NQA values in the SI+ group were generally lower than those in the Depressed and HC groups in the corpus callosum and cingulate gyrus. Furthermore, we found that the SI+ group demonstrated higher global integration and lower local segregation among the three groups of participants. In the network-based statistical analysis, we discovered that the SI+ group had stronger connections of subnetworks in the frontal lobe than the HC group. We found significant structural differences in depressed patients with suicidal ideation compared to depressed patients without suicidal ideation and healthy controls and we also found several network alterations among these groups of participants, which indicated that white matter integrity and network alterations are associated with patients with depression as well as suicidal ideation.
Highlights
Suicide is one of the critical challenges for healthcare systems worldwide
Our study focused on investigating the variation of specific brain neurological structures and the alteration of brain network connectome among three groups of individuals, including depressed patients with suicidal ideation (SI+), depressed patients without suicidal ideation (Depressed), and healthy controls (HC) by use of extensive generalized q-sampling imaging (GQI) and graph theoretical analysis
We focused on the value of both generalized fractional anisotropy (GFA) and normalized quantitative anisotropy (NQA) to investigate white matter integrity in this study
Summary
More than 800,000 people die from suicide every year worldwide; suicide has become one of the leading causes of death for younger generations (Bilsen, 2018). Previous studies have indicated that various factors could lead to suicidal ideation, such as behaviors, including irregular impulse control, sociopsychological circumstances, a tendency to intense psychological pain, and a history of medical conditions (Joiner et al, 2005; Pompili et al, 2015). Mental disorders are considered to be the predominant factor in suicidal ideation, with depression disorders as the main type of mental disorder linked to suicide ideation (Hawton et al, 2013). The World Health Organization (WHO) has ranked depressive disorder as one of the leading causes of mortality worldwide, and it is highly recurrent and prevalent and is associated with functional disability and morbidity (Richards, 2011; Murray et al, 2012). Due to the seriousness and ubiquity of depression and suicidal ideation, numerous studies have been performed on depression in the fields of neuroimaging, neurobiology, psychiatry, animal testing and so on (Blazer, 2003; Dean and Keshavan, 2017; Liu et al, 2017; Planchez et al, 2019)
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