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. 2019 Aug 16:10:585.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00585. eCollection 2019.

Increased Nucleus Accumbens Connectivity in Resting-State Patients With Drug-Naive, First-Episode Somatization Disorder

Yangpan Ou  1   2 , Qinji Su  3 , Feng Liu  4 , Yudan Ding  1   2 , Jindong Chen  1   2 , Zhikun Zhang  3 , Jingping Zhao  1   2 , Wenbin Guo  1   2
Affiliations

Increased Nucleus Accumbens Connectivity in Resting-State Patients With Drug-Naive, First-Episode Somatization Disorder

Yangpan Ou et al. Front Psychiatry. .

Abstract

The nucleus accumbens (NAc) plays an important role in the reward circuit, and abnormal regional activities of the reward circuit have been reported in various psychiatric disorders including somatization disorder (SD). However, few researches are designed to analyze the NAc connectivity in SD. This study was designed to explore the NAc connectivity in first-episode, drug-naive patients with SD using the bilateral NAc as seeds. Twenty-five first-episode, drug-naive patients with SD and 28 healthy controls were recruited. Functional connectivity (FC) was designed to analyze the images. LIBSVM (a library for support vector machines) was used to identify whether abnormal FC could be utilized to discriminate the patients from the controls. The patients showed significantly increased FC between the left NAc and the right gyrus rectus and left medial prefrontal cortex/anterior cingulate cortex (MPFC/ACC), and between the right NAc and the left gyrus rectus and left MPFC/ACC compared with the controls. The patients could be separated from the controls through increased FC between the left NAc and the right gyrus rectus with a sensitivity of 88.00% and a specificity of 82.14%. The findings reveal that patients with SD have increased NAc connectivity with the frontal regions of the reward circuit. Increased left NAc-right gyrus rectus connectivity can be used as a potential marker to discriminate patients with SD from healthy controls. The study thus highlights the importance of the reward circuit in the neuropathology of SD.

Keywords: functional connectivity; functional magnetic resonance imaging; reward circuit; somatization disorder; support vector machine.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Statistical maps showing seed-based functional connectivity differences between subject groups. The patients showed significantly increased FC between the left NAc and the right gyrus rectus and left MPFC/ACC, and between the right NAc and the left gyrus rectus and left MPFC/ACC compared with the controls. Red denotes high FC values in the patients, and the color bar indicates the T values from two-sample t-tests. FC, functional connectivity; NAc, nucleus accumbens; MPFC/ACC, medial prefrontal cortex/anterior cingulate cortex.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Visualization of the SVM results for identifying patients from controls using the FC values between the left NAc and the right gyrus rectus. Left: 3D view of the classified accuracy with the best parameters; right: classified map of the FC values between the left NAc and the right gyrus rectus. SVM, Support vector machine; FC, functional connectivity; NAc, nucleus accumbens.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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