Left Amygdala Functional Connectivity Decreased after Fear of Negative Events was Disregarded in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a chronic and debilitating mental disorder that affects patients throughout their lives, leading to a diminished quality of life for patients and families, reduced productivity, and higher health care costs. It is of clinical and theoretical importance to investigate a more efficacious therapeutic approach for OCD and the neurophysiological mechanism underlying the efficacy of treatment, potentially associated with the etiology of OCD. Recently, a novel psychotherapy designated cognitive-coping therapy (CCT) has been reported to have a large effect size in OCD treatment. CCT hypothesizes that fear of negative events plays a crucial role in OCD. The study entitled “Decreased left amygdala functional connectivity by cognitive-coping therapy in obsessive-compulsive disorder” attempted to investigate the potential neurophysiological mechanism underlying the efficacy of CCT for OCD. The study provides crystal evidence showing that 4-week pharmacotherapy plus CCT decreases the left amygdala seed-based functional connectivity (LA-FC) with the right anterior cingulate gyrus and the left paracentral lobule/the left superior parietal/left inferior parietal, and 4-week CCT decreases the LA-FC with the left middle occipital gyrus/the left superior parietal. The alteration of the LA-FC with the right anterior cingulate gyrus positively correlates to the reduction of the Yale-Brown obsessive-compulsive scale (Y-BOCS) score. Therefore, it provides new insights into understanding the neurophysiology and neuropsychology behind the onset and treatment of OCD.