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. 2024 Oct;102(10):e25388.
doi: 10.1002/jnr.25388.

Thalamocortical Dysconnectivity in Treatment-Resistant Depression

Pei-Chi Tu  1   2   3   4 , Wei-Chen Lin  1   2   5 , Wan-Chen Chang  1   3   6 , Tung-Ping Su  1   2   5   7 , Cheng-Ta Li  1   2   5 , Ya-Mei Bai  1   2   5 , Shih-Jen Tsai  1   2   5 , Mu-Hong Chen  1   2   5
Affiliations

Thalamocortical Dysconnectivity in Treatment-Resistant Depression

Pei-Chi Tu et al. J Neurosci Res. 2024 Oct.

Abstract

Thalamocortical connectivity is associated with cognitive and affective processing. The role of thalamocortical connectivity in the pathomechanism of treatment-resistant depression (TRD) remains unclear. This study included 48 patients with TRD and 48 healthy individuals. We investigated thalamocortical connectivity by performing resting-state functional MRI with the bilateral thalamus as the seed. In addition, patients with TRD were evaluated using the Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS). Compared with the healthy individuals, the patients with TRD exhibited increased functional connectivity (FC) of the thalamus with the insula and superior temporal cortex and reduced the FC of the thalamus with the anterior paracingulate cortex and cerebellum crus II. Our study may support the crucial role of thalamocortical dysconnectivity in the TRD pathomechanism. However, the small sample size may limit the statistical power. A future study with a large sample size of patients with TRD would be required to validate our findings.

Keywords: cerebellum crus II; insula; paracingulate cortex; thalamocortical connectivity; treatment‐resistant depression.

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