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. 2022 Jul 26:16:946543.
doi: 10.3389/fnins.2022.946543. eCollection 2022.

Characteristics of prefrontal activity during emotional and cognitive processing in patients with bipolar disorder: A multi-channel functional near-infrared spectroscopy study

Mengchai Mao  1 , Guifang Chen  2   3 , Kun Feng  2 , Dongsheng Xu  1   4 , Xuyun Hua  1   4 , Chunlei Shan  1   4 , Pozi Liu  2
Affiliations

Characteristics of prefrontal activity during emotional and cognitive processing in patients with bipolar disorder: A multi-channel functional near-infrared spectroscopy study

Mengchai Mao et al. Front Neurosci. .

Abstract

Bipolar disorder (BD) is a recurrent chronic mental disorder with a broad profile of functional deficits including disturbed emotional processing and cognitive impairments. The goal of the current study was to further explore the underlying neural mechanism of dysfunction in patients with BD from a comprehensive perspective of both cognition and emotion. Forty-six clinical patients with BD and forty-five healthy controls performed emotion induction task and verbal fluency task (VFT), with frontal activity measured by functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Our results show distinct hemodynamic activity in the prefrontal region during emotional and cognitive processing between patients with BD and healthy controls. Patients with BD exhibit valence-dependent prefrontal cortex (PFC) hemodynamic response to emotional stimuli, with bilateral frontal hypoactivity indicating decreased positive reactivity and left frontal hyperactivity indicating increased negative reactivity. On the other hand, patients with BD showed impaired performance with bilateral frontal hypoactivity during VFT. Taken together, frontal dysfunction of cognition and emotionality in patients with BD probed by fNIRS would be a potential biomarker in clinical assessment.

Keywords: bipolar disorder; emotion; functional near-infrared spectroscopy; prefrontal cortex; verbal fluency.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
(A) Flow of emotion induction task. Three emotion blocks (pleasant, neutral unpleasant). Each block includes five trials, and each trial contains a 5-s task period and a 2-s rest period. The total duration of the emotion induction task was 105 s. (B) The flow of verbal fluency task. Four category blocks (vegetables, home appliances, four-footed animals, and fruits). Each block contains a 30-s task period and a 30-s rest period. The total duration of the verbal fluency task was 240 s.
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
(A) Optodes arrangement of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) measurements. Numbers in red represent emitters, blue represent detectors, and white represents channels. (B) Channels projected to the rendered brain by a probabilistic registration process using NIRS-SPM (Ye et al., 2009; Tsuzuki and Dan, 2014). (C) Sensitivity map with front and side views over the frontal cortex estimated by Monte-Carlo simulation using the Atlas Viewer from Homer2 (Boas et al., 2002; Aasted et al., 2015). Red dots represent the emitters, blue dots the detectors, and green lines the channels. The colormap represents spatial sensitivity values ranging from –2 to 0 in log10 units.
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
Comparison between bipolar disorder (BD) patients and healthy controls (HCs) of frontal activation and time course of hemodynamic changes evoked by pleasant pictures (A,B), unpleasant pictures (C,D), and verbal fluency task (VFT) task (E,F). The colormap represents the discrepancy (t-value) of frontal cortex activation between BD patients and HCs.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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