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Abnormal brain activation during emotion processing of euthymic bipolar patients taking different mood stabilizers

Brain Imaging and Behavior volume 13, pages 905–913 (2019)Cite this article

Abstract

Numerous functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have been conducted to elucidate emotion processing of patients with bipolar disorder (BD), but due to different inclusion criteria used, especially for the history of medication use, the results for euthymic BD patients are inconsistent. For this reason, brain functional effects of psychopharmacological treatments on BD patients have been investigated by numerous fMRI studies, but there is no existing report for brain functional effects of different mood stabilizers. In this study, we compared the emotion processing in BD patients treated by two popularly used mood stabilizer, lithium (N = 13; 30 ± 9 years) and valproate (N = 16; 33 ± 8 years), as well as healthy controls (HC; N = 16; 29 ± 7 years). Two emotional tasks were applied in this study: one used emotional pictures of everyday objects and scenes, and another used emotional facial expression pictures. The main findings were that BD on lithium showed increased fMRI activation in the right dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and bilateral lingual gyrus in response to the positive pictures relative to neutral pictures compared with BD on valproate and HC. Besides, no abnormal activation was observed in the amygdala. Limitations of this study comprise the small sample size and the cross-sectional design. Therefore, the results were suggestive of a different effect of lithium and valproate on brain activities during emotion processing but no causal role can be proposed. The enduring impairments in euthymic state could provide clues to the brain regions involved in the primary pathology of BD.

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Funding

This study was funded by the Science and Technology Bureau of Shenzhen city (grant number JCYJ20150402093137765), the Shenzhen Peacock Plan (grant number KQTD2016053112051497), and the Sanming Project of Medicine in Shenzhen (grant number SZSM201612006). The authors thank Dr. Yiru Fang, from Shanghai Mental Health Center of China, for advice concerning results interpretation.

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Affiliations

  1. School of Biomedical Engineering, Health Science Center, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, 518060, China

    Linling Li, Fei Tang & Zhiguo Zhang

  2. Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Biomedical Measurements and Ultrasound Imaging, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, 518060, China

    Linling Li, Fei Tang & Zhiguo Zhang

  3. Department for Affective Disorders, Shenzhen Mental Health Centre, Shenzhen Key Lab for Psychological Healthcare, Shenzhen, 518020, China

    Erni Ji & Haichen Yang

  4. Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, 518060, China

    Yunhai Qiu

  5. Mental Health Institute of the Second Xiangya Hospital, National Technology Institute of Psychiatry, Key Laboratory of Psychiatry and Mental Health of Hunan Province, Central South University, Changsha, 410011, China

    Xue Han

  6. Department of Mental Health, Shenzhen Nanshan Center for Chronic Disease Control , Shenzhen, 518060, China

    Xue Han

  7. Department of Communication Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, 518060, China

    Shengli Zhang

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  1. Linling Li
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  2. Erni Ji
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  3. Fei Tang
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  4. Yunhai Qiu
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  6. Shengli Zhang
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  7. Zhiguo Zhang
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  8. Haichen Yang
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Correspondence to Zhiguo Zhang or Haichen Yang.

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Conflict of interest

Linling Li, Erni Ji, Fei Tang, Yunhai Qiu, Xue Han, Shengli Zhang, Zhiguo Zhang and Haichen Yang declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in this study were approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee of the Shenzhen Mental Health Centre, and were conducted in accordance with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Li, L., Ji, E., Tang, F. et al. Abnormal brain activation during emotion processing of euthymic bipolar patients taking different mood stabilizers. Brain Imaging and Behavior 13, 905–913 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-018-9915-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-018-9915-z

Keywords

  • Bipolar disorder
  • Mood stabilizers
  • Emotion processing
  • Functional magnetic resonance imaging
  • Anterior cingulate cortex