Short- and long-range functional connectivity density alterations in adolescents with pure conduct disorder at resting-state

Abstract

Conduct disorder (CD) is a developmental disorder defined by a repetitive and persistent display of antisocial and aggressive behaviors that violates the rights of others or basic social rules. Recently, resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) has been widely adopted to investigate the altered intrinsic neural activities and the disrupted endogenous brain connectivity of CD. In this study, functional connectivity density (FCD) mapping, a newly developed ultrafast voxel-wise method based on rsfMRI, was applied for the first time to examine the changes in the brain functional connectivity in CD at the voxel level. We assessed the differences in FCD between eighteen male adolescents with CD and eighteen typically-developing (TD) individuals. Then, the identified brain regions in which CD patients and healthy controls exhibited significant difference in FCD were extracted to calculate the correlations between measures of FCD values and clinical data. We discovered that compared to healthy controls, CD patients showed increased short-range FCD in the default-mode network including the bilateral posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) and the bilateral precuneus (PCUN). More importantly, increased short-range FCD values in the bilateral PCC, the bilateral PCUN, and increased long-range FCD values in the left MCC showed significant correlations with the impulsivity. Overall, these results suggested that the FCD abnormalities in CD patients occurred in brain regions known to be involved in cognition, emotion and visual perception.