Citation

Marchand WR, Lee JN, Garn C, Thatcher J, Gale P, Kreitschitz S, Johnson S, Wood N. Prog. Neuropsychopharmacol. Biol. Psychiatry 2011; 35(7): 1729-1737.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.pnpbp.2011.05.017

PMID

21664220

Abstract

Bipolar II depression is a serious and disabling illness associated with significant impairment and high rates of suicide attempts. However, mechanisms underlying emotional dysregulation in this condition are poorly characterized. The goal of this work was to investigate one component of emotional processing in this disorder, brain activation associated with exposure to emotional faces. Functional MRI was used to study 16 unmedicated male subjects with bipolar II depression and 19 healthy male controls. The activation paradigm exposed subjects to happy, fearful and neutral faces. The two key findings of this study were as follows. First, bipolar subjects demonstrated significantly decreased activation in response to happy facial expression in the left posterior cortical midline structures (CMS) and frontal cortex. Second, depression severity was positively correlated with activation of the posterior CMS and other regions. Our results suggest that mechanisms involving CMS dysfunction may play a role in the neurobiology of bipolar II depression as has been demonstrated for unipolar illness. Further investigations of CMS function in bipolar spectrum disorders are warranted.

Language: en

Keywords

Humans; Adult; Female; Male; Middle Aged; Computers; Emotions; Young Adult; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Brain; Amygdala; Gyrus Cinguli; Happiness; Fear; Bipolar Disorder; Software; Facial Expression