Shared and Specific Intrinsic Functional Connectivity Patterns in Unmedicated Bipolar Disorder and Major Depressive Disorder

Identifying brain differences and similarities between bipolar disorder (BD) and major depressive disorder (MDD) is necessary for increasing our understanding of the pathophysiology and for developing more effective treatments. However, the features of whole-brain intrinsic functional connectivity underlying BD and MDD have not been directly compared. We collected resting-state fMRI data from 48 BD patients, 48 MDD patients, and 51 healthy subjects. We constructed voxel-wise whole-brain functional networks and computed regional functional connectivity strength (FCS) using graph-theory and further divided the regional FCS into long-range FCS (lFCS) and short-range FCS (sFCS). Relative to the controls, both the BD and MDD patients showed decreased sFCS in the bilateral precuneus. In addition, the BD patients showed increased and the MDD patients showed decreased lFCS and sFCS in the bilateral cerebellum. The BD patients also showed increased lFCS in the right middle temporal gyrus and increased sFCS in the bilateral thalamus compared to either the MDD patients or the controls. These findings suggest that BD and MDD may have some shared as well as a greater number of specific impairments in their functional connectivity patterns, providing new evidence for the pathophysiology of BD and MDD at the large-scale whole brain connectivity level.