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. 2019 Jul 24:13:747.
doi: 10.3389/fnins.2019.00747. eCollection 2019.

Functional Brain Changes During Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy Associated With Tinnitus Severity

Benjamin Zimmerman  1   2 , Megan Finnegan  1   2   3 , Subhadeep Paul  4 , Sara Schmidt  2   3 , Yihsin Tai  1 , Kelly Roth  1 , Yuguo Chen  5 , Fatima T Husain  1   2   3
Affiliations

Functional Brain Changes During Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy Associated With Tinnitus Severity

Benjamin Zimmerman et al. Front Neurosci. .

Abstract

Mindfulness-based therapies have been introduced as a treatment option to reduce the psychological severity of tinnitus, a currently incurable chronic condition. This pilot study of twelve subjects with chronic tinnitus investigates the relationship between measures of both task-based and resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and measures of tinnitus severity, assessed with the Tinnitus Functional Index (TFI). MRI was measured at three time points: before, after, and at follow-up of an 8-week long mindfulness-based cognitive therapy intervention. During the task-based fMRI with affective sounds, no significant changes were observed between sessions, nor was the activation to emotionally salient compared to neutral stimuli significantly predictive of TFI. Significant results were found using resting state fMRI. There were significant decreases in functional connectivity among the default mode network, cingulo-opercular network, and amygdala across the intervention, but no differences were seen in connectivity with seeds in the dorsal attention network (DAN) or fronto-parietal network and the rest of the brain. Further, only resting state connectivity between the brain and the amygdala, DAN, and fronto-parietal network significantly predicted TFI. These results point to a mostly differentiated landscape of functional brain measures related to tinnitus severity on one hand and mindfulness-based therapy on the other. However, overlapping results of decreased amygdala connectivity with parietal areas and the negative correlation between amygdala-parietal connectivity and TFI is suggestive of a brain imaging marker of successful treatment.

Keywords: functional MRI; graph connectivity analysis; mindfulness-based cognitive therapy; resting state MRI; tinnitus.

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Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
DMN connectivity changes between time points of the mindfulness intervention. (A) Connectivity between the DMN and clusters in the right thalamus and left calcarine sulcus significantly decreases from the pre-intervention session to the follow-up session. (B) Connectivity between the DMN and a cluster in the right angular gyrus significantly increases from the post-intervention session to the follow-up session.
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Connectivity with the amygdala from the pre-intervention session to the post-intervention session decreases in a cluster overlapping the left inferior parietal lobule.
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
Seed-voxel connectivity that significantly predicts TFI with the (A) AMYG, (B) DAN_1, (C) left FPN, and (D) right FPN. For each section, the left panel shows the Wald statistic, while the right panel indicates the beta value and the direction of the relationship.
FIGURE 4
FIGURE 4
Connectivity between the left CON and the left superior frontal gyrus decreases from the post-intervention to the follow-up session.
FIGURE 5
FIGURE 5
Comparison of pre-intervention (week 0), post intervention (week 8) and follow up (week 16) session brain networks in terms of (A) Median modularity, (B) Median global efficiency, and (C) Median global clustering coefficient as a function of increasing network density, along with the (D) distribution of the TFI scores measured for subjects at those sessions.
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