Abstract
Conduct disorder (CD) is a common psychiatric disorder defined by a repetitive and persistent pattern of aggressive and antisocial behaviors. Although numerous task-based and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) studies have emphasized the disrupted functional connectivity in CD, the CD-related alterations in functional interactions between the bilateral cerebral hemispheres are rarely investigated directly. In this study, a voxel-mirrored homotopic connectivity (VMHC) method based on rsfMRI was employed for the first time to examine the abnormalities of interhemispheric functional connectivity in patients with CD. The VMHC was compared between eighteen pure CD patients and eighteen typically developing (TD) healthy controls. In CD patients, reduced homotopic connectivity was observed relative to TDs in the middle occipital gyrus (MOG), pre- and postcentral gyrus, rolandic operculum and paracentral lobe (PCL) which were the components of visual and motor networks. Furthermore, the VMHC of the MOG and PCL was found to be negatively correlated with clinical scores in the CD group. Moreover, the regions with altered VMHC exhibited a relative good and robust ability to discriminate CD patients from TDs. This study provided a novel angle to identify the important role of interhemispheric coordination in the pathophysiology underlying CD and further indicated that the aberrant homotopic connectivity could be a potential clinical neural marker for CD diagnosis.
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Acknowledgments
This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81571341, 61876114, 81603673, 61901129 and 31800961), Hunan Province innovation province construction project (2019SK2334), MYRG2018-00081-FHS grant from the University of Macau, FDCT 0011/2018/A1 grant from the Macao government, Sichuan Science and Technology Program (2017JY0031 and 2018JY0361), and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation Grant (2018 M633336, 2019 M653383 and 2019 M660236), and Cangzhou science and technology research and development project (162302137). These funding sources were not involved in any stage of the study design, data collection, data analysis and interpretation of data, writing the manuscript and in the decision to submit the article for publication. We thank all authors’ work for this study. We also thank the patients and healthy controls who donated their time and effort to participate in this study.
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Lu, F., Wang, M., Xu, S. et al. Decreased interhemispheric resting-state functional connectivity in male adolescents with conduct disorder. Brain Imaging and Behavior 15, 1201–1210 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-020-00320-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-020-00320-8