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. 2022 Jan;35(1):78-88.
doi: 10.1177/0891988720964258. Epub 2020 Oct 8.

Depression Is Associated With Preserved Cortical Thickness Relative to Apathy in Frontotemporal Dementia

Rakshathi Basavaraju  1 , Xinyang Feng  2 , Jeanelle France  1 , Edward D Huey  3   4 , Frank A Provenzano  1
Affiliations

Depression Is Associated With Preserved Cortical Thickness Relative to Apathy in Frontotemporal Dementia

Rakshathi Basavaraju et al. J Geriatr Psychiatry Neurol. 2022 Jan.

Abstract

Objectives: To understand the differential neuroanatomical substrates underlying apathy and depression in Frontotemporal dementia (FTD).

Methods: T1-MRIs and clinical data of patients with behavioral and aphasic variants of FTD were obtained from an open database. Cortical thickness was derived, its association with apathy severity and difference between the depressed and not depressed were examined with appropriate covariates.

Results: Apathy severity was significantly associated with cortical thinning of the lateral parts of the right sided frontal, temporal and parietal lobes. The right sided orbitofrontal, parsorbitalis and rostral anterior cingulate cortex were thicker in depressed compared to patients not depressed.

Conclusions: Greater thickness of right sided ventromedial and inferior frontal cortex in depression compared to patients without depression suggests a possible requisite of gray matter in this particular area for the manifestation of depression in FTD. This study demonstrates a method for deriving neuroanatomical patterns across non-harmonized neuroimaging data in a neurodegenerative disease.

Keywords: apathy; cortical thickness; depression; frontotemporal dementia; right frontal cortex; structural MRI.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Dr. Rakshathi Basavaraju reports no disclosures. Dr. Xinyang Feng is currently a Research Scientist at Facebook Inc. He participated in this study when he was a PhD student in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Columbia University. Ms. Jeanelle France reports no disclosures. Dr. Edward D. Huey reports no disclosures. Dr. Frank A. Provenzano is a consultant for and has equity in IMIJ technologies.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Clinical and imaging data acquisition. Structural T1 MRI scans, demographic and clinical data obtained from the open public neuroimaging database, Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration Neuroimaging Initiative (FTLDNI) http://memory.ucsf.edu/research/studies/nifd. The process of arrival at the final sample for the analysis along with exclusions have been described. FTD: Frontotemporal Dementia, bvFTD: behavioral variant FTD, svPPA: semantic variant Primary Progressive Aphasia, nfvPPA: non-fluent variant PPA, ANTs: Advanced Normalization Tools (software used for analyzing cortical thickness).
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Apathy and cortical thickness in FTD. Brain sections showing the statistical significance of the associations of cortical thickness of Regions of Interest and apathy severity score (significant at p ≤ 0.05, all significant areas are inversely associated), RH = Right Hemisphere, LH = Left Hemisphere. The blue-green intersecting lines indicate the plane at which the coronal and axial sections are depicted.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Depression and cortical thickness in FTD. Brain sections showing the statistical significance of the differences of cortical thickness of Regions of Interest between the depressed and the non-depressed FTD patients (significant at p ≤ 0.05, all significant areas are thicker in depressed), RH = Right Hemisphere, LH = Left Hemisphere. The blue-green intersecting lines indicate the plane at which the coronal and axial sections are depicted.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Cortical thickness of the right sided inferior and ventromedial frontal cortex in FTD patients with and without depression. Boxplots with a scatter of cortical thickness values of brain areas that are significantly different (p < 0.05) between FTD-Depressed and the FTD-Non-Depressed, mm = millimeter, bvFTD = behavioral variant Frontotemporal Dementia, svPPA = semantic variant Primary Progressive Aphasia, nfvPPA = non-fluent variant Primary Progressive Aphasia.
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