Abstract
Psychomotor disturbances are a classic feature of major depressive disorders. These can manifest as lack of facial expressions and decreased speech production, reduced body posture and mobility, and slowed voluntary movement. The neural correlates of psychomotor disturbances in depression are poorly understood but it has been suggested that outputs from the cingulate motor area (CMA) to striatal motor regions, including the putamen, could be involved. We used functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging to conduct a region-of-interest analysis to test the hypotheses that neural activation patterns related to motor production and gray matter volumes in the CMA would be different between depressed subjects displaying psychomotor disturbances (n = 13) and matched healthy controls (n = 13). In addition, we conducted a psychophysiological interaction analysis to assess the functional coupling related to self-paced finger-tapping between the caudal CMA and the posterior putamen in patients compared to controls. We found a cluster of increased neural activation, adjacent to a cluster of decreased gray matter volume in the caudal CMA in patients compared to controls. The functional coupling between the left caudal CMA and the left putamen during finger-tapping task performance was additionally decreased in patients compared to controls. In addition, the strength of the functional coupling between the left caudal CMA and the left putamen was negatively correlated with the severity of psychomotor disturbances in the patient group. In conclusion, we found converging evidence for involvement of the caudal CMA and putamen in the generation of psychomotor disturbances in depression.
Highlights
Psychomotor disturbance is a cardinal feature of major depressive disorder
FUNCTIONAL ACTIVATION In our group, comparison of task-related neural activation in the caudal cingulate motor area (CMA) during self-paced finger-tapping, we found that patients activated the left caudal CMA more than healthy controls
We found that neural activation in controls showed a task-related correspondence between the left caudal CMA and left posterior putamen regions connected to caudal motor regions in the frontal lobe, whereas this relationship was absent in the patients
Summary
Psychomotor disturbance is a cardinal feature of major depressive disorder. Investigations of the neural correlates underpinning psychomotor disturbances remain sparse; the motor system has been relatively neglected in brain imaging studies of psychiatric disorders in general [8]. Available evidence points to metabolic deficits, neurochemical changes, and altered structural connections and functional connectivity involving large-scale brain networks that connect frontal cortical regions and subcortical Interactions between the striatum, frontal motor regions, and prefrontal association cortices are known to be critical to the initiation and regulation of motor output and cognitive processing [25, 26]. The localization and relevance of brain abnormalities in these fronto-striatal systems to psychomotor disturbances observed in depression remains largely unknown
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