Citation

Houenou J, Perlini C, Brambilla P. Epidemiol. Psychiatr. Sci. 2015; 24(2): 117-120.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Cambridge University Press)

DOI

10.1017/S2045796014000766

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Although neurobiological mechanisms of bipolar disorder (BD) are still unclear, neural models of the disease have recently been conceptualised thanks to neuroimaging. Indeed, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies investigating structural and functional connectivity between different areas of the brain suggest an altered prefrontal-limbic coupling leading to disrupted emotional processing in BD, including uncinate fasciculus, amygdala, parahippocampal cortex, cingulate cortex as well corpus callosum. Specifically, these models assume an altered prefrontal control over a hyperactivity of the subcortical limbic structures implicated in automatic emotional processing. This impaired mechanism may finally trigger emotional hyper-reactivity and mood episodes. In this review, we first summarised some key neuroimaging studies on BD. In the second part of the work, we focused on the heterogeneity of the available studies. This variability is partly due to methodological factors (i.e., small sample size) and differences among studies (i.e., MRI acquisition and post-processing analyses) and partly to the clinical heterogeneity of BD. We finally outlined how epidemiological studies should indicate which risk factors and clinical dimensions of BD are relevant to be studied with neuroimaging in order to reduce heterogeneity and go beyond diagnostic categories. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015.

Language: en

Keywords

human; migration; epidemiology; bipolar disorder; functional magnetic resonance imaging; prefrontal cortex; suicide attempt; major depression; mood disorder; neuroimaging; risk factor; clinical feature; research; environmental factor; emotion; nuclear magnetic resonance imaging; borderline state; limbic system; congenital malformation; limbic cortex; hyperactivity; Article; cingulate gyrus; amygdaloid nucleus; corpus callosum; neuroanatomy; voxel based morphometry; fractional anisotropy; cannabis use; parahippocampal gyrus; Biological markers; brain imaging techniques; tractography; uncinate fasciculus