Girls' internalizing symptoms and white matter tracts in Cortico-Limbic circuitry

Abstract

Dysfunction in cortico-limbic circuitry is implicated in internalizing disorders (i.e., depressive and anxious disorders), but less is known about whether structural variations precede frank disorder and thus potentially mark risk. We therefore examined associations between white matter (WM) tract microstructure in cortico-limbic circuitry at age 7 and concurrent and longitudinal patterns of internalizing symptoms in 42 typically developing girls using Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI). Girls' internalizing symptoms were concurrently associated with reduced fractional anisotropy (FA) in segments of the cingulum bundle (CB) and the uncinate fasciculus (UF), bilaterally. Moreover, latent profile analysis showed that girls with increasing internalizing symptoms, based on assessments at ages 3, 6, 7, and 8, had reduced FA in these segments compared to girls with stably low symptoms. These results point to a putative neural mechanism underlying the course of childhood internalizing symptoms.

Keywords: Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI); Internalizing symptoms; Latent profile analysis; White matter microstructure.

Fig. 1

Tract profiles of a) left cingulum bundle, b) right cingulum bundle (both shown in blue), c) left uncinate fasciculus, and d) right uncinate fasciculus (both shown in green), with red color indicating segments where FA was significantly correlated with internalizing symptoms. The range of p-values is shown on the color bar. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

Fig. 2

Latent Profile Analysis plot for CBCL Anxiety/Depression symptom profiles (2-class model).

Fig. 3

Tract FA profiles for the a) left cingulum bundle, b) right cingulum bundle, c) left uncinate fasciculus, and d) right uncinate fasciculus showing regions where mean FA differed significantly between risk groups. Location of cingulum bundle nodes are shown posterior to anterior, and those of the uncinate fasciculus are shown temporal to prefrontal.