Decreased Nucleus Accumbens Connectivity at Rest in Medication-Free Patients with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

Yunhui Chen,Lei Sun,Jidong Ma,Tinghuizi Shang,Zhenghai Sun,Ru Yang,Dan Lv,Wenbin Guo,Yangpan Ou,Guangfeng Zhang,Ping Li,Cuicui Jia,Chuang Zhan,Yuhua Wang,Xiaoping Wang,J Michael Wyss

doi:10.1155/2021/9966378

Abstract

Background Patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) experience deficiencies in reward processing. The investigation of the reward circuit and its essential connectivity may further clarify the pathogenesis of OCD. Methods The current research was designed to analyze the nucleus accumbens (NAc) functional connectivity at rest in medicine-free patients with OCD. Forty medication-free patients and 38 gender-, education-, and age-matched healthy controls (HCs) were recruited for resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. Seed-based functional connectivity (FC) was used to analyze the data. LIBSVM (library for support vector machines) was designed to identify whether altered FC could be applied to differentiate OCD. Results Patients with OCD showed remarkably decreased FC values between the left NAc and the bilateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and bilateral medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and between the right NAc and the left OFC at rest in the reward circuit. Moreover, decreased left NAc-bilateral MPFC connectivity can be deemed as a potential biomarker to differentiate OCD from HCs with a sensitivity of 80.00% and a specificity of 76.32%. Conclusion The current results emphasize the importance of the reward circuit in the pathogenesis of OCD.

Highlights

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a heritable, disabling, and chronic psychiatric disorder with an approximated lifetime prevalence of 1%–3% [1]
The reward circuit is composed of the nucleus accumbens (NAc), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), ventral tegmental area (VTA), hippocampus, and brain areas of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which are involved in incentive salience, positive emotions, and associative learning [4, 5]
Education, Yale– Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS) total score, subscales score, Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAMD) score, Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale (HAMA) score, and framewise displacement (FD) were tested by two-sample t-test; the results were indicated by t values

Summary

Background

Patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) experience deficiencies in reward processing. The investigation of the reward circuit and its essential connectivity may further clarify the pathogenesis of OCD. The current research was designed to analyze the nucleus accumbens (NAc) functional connectivity at rest in medicine-free patients with OCD. Forty medication-free patients and 38 gender-, education-, and age-matched healthy controls (HCs) were recruited for resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. Patients with OCD showed remarkably decreased FC values between the left NAc and the bilateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and bilateral medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and between the right NAc and the left OFC at rest in the reward circuit. Decreased left NAc-bilateral MPFC connectivity can be deemed as a potential biomarker to differentiate OCD from HCs with a sensitivity of 80.00% and a specificity of 76.32%. The current results emphasize the importance of the reward circuit in the pathogenesis of OCD

Introduction

Materials and Methods

Results

Discussion