Electroconvulsive therapy modulates grey matter increase in a hub of an affect processing network

Publication date: Available online 9 December 2019Source: NeuroImage: ClinicalAuthor(s): Julia A. Camilleri, Felix Hoffstaedter, Maxim Zavorotny, Rebecca Zöllner, Robert Christian Wolf, Philipp Thomann, Ronny Redlich, Nils Opel, Udo Dannlowski, Michael Groezinger, Traute Demirakca, Alexander Sartorius, Simon B. Eickhoff, Thomas Nickl-JockschatAbstractA growing number of recent studies have suggested that the neuroplastic effects of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) might be prominent enough to be detected through changes of regional gray matter volume (GMV) during the course of the treatment. Given that ECT patients are difficult to recruit for imaging studies, most publications, however, report only on small samples. Addressing this challenge, we here report results of a structural imaging study on ECT patients that pooled patients from five German sites.Whole-brain voxel-based morphometry (VBM) analysis was performed to detect structural differences in 85 patients with unipolar depression before and after ECT, when compared to 86 healthy controls. Both task-independent and task-dependent physiological whole-brain functional connectivity patterns of these regions were modeled using additional data from healthy subjects. All emerging regions were additionally functionally characterized using the BrainMap database.Our VBM analysis detected a significant increase of GMV in the right hippocampus/amygdala region in patients after ECT compared to healthy controls. In healthy subjec...
Source: NeuroImage: Clinical - Category: Radiology Source Type: research