Trans-Diagnostic Relations Between Functional Brain Network Integrity and Cognition

 描述(由申请人提供)：认知障碍是精神健康障碍的一个致残特征，对精神分裂症、双相情感障碍和严重抑郁症患者的影响最严重。这些人群经历的认知缺陷与日常功能障碍有关，使认知成为治疗和干预的关键目标。尽管需要治疗，但目前尚不清楚精神分裂症、双相情感障碍和抑郁症患者的认知障碍是否有不同的病因，需要制定不同的干预措施，或者类似的治疗方法是否对所有三个临床组都有效。因此，更好地了解这些缺陷是如何与诊断组的神经生物学异常相关联的，是努力干预和补救认知障碍的重要下一步。目前的项目直接针对这一步骤，通过评估不同诊断小组的大脑网络组织的差异，并测试关于这些差异如何与认知能力相关的假设。研究表明，大脑功能网络的组织和完整性支持认知功能，如记忆、执行功能和处理速度。因此，我们假设，这些网络的组织可以为与精神疾病相关的神经生物学异常提供关键的见解。这项研究的第一个目的是测量被认为支持高阶认知的功能网络的效率，额顶网络(FPN)和扣带盖网络(CON)，在精神分裂症、双相情感障碍、抑郁症和健康对照组中。使用图论算法计算的网络效率差异将被用来预测诊断组内和跨诊断组在工作记忆、情景记忆、执行功能和处理速度等任务上的表现。此外，这项研究的第二个目标将着眼于被称为中枢的特定大脑区域，这些区域对于网络之间的信息传输特别重要。中枢节点与其他网络通信的程度也将被用来预测认知表现，以更好地了解特定大脑区域参与的减少是否会影响认知表现。基于以下假设，我们预测这些关系将在诊断组内和跨诊断组保持，并且不会观察到与组的交互，该假设是跨诊断组的认知和网络度量之间的关系是相似的，但是这些度量的大小以分级方式(controls&gt；depression&gt；bipolar&gt；schizophrenia).不同通过这两个目标，我们可以更复杂地了解脑网络功能组织是如何与认知缺陷相关的，以及这些关系是否会因个人的诊断状态而不同。有了这些信息，就可以对精神健康障碍中异常的特异性做出更有针对性的预测，从而可以对解决这些临床人群中的认知障碍所需的治疗类型做出更有针对性的预测。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Cognitive impairments are a disabling characteristic of mental health disorders, most severely impacting individuals with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression. The cognitive deficits experienced by these populations are associated with impairments in daily functioning, making cognition a critical target for treatment and intervention. Despite this need for treatment, it remains unclear whether the cognitive impairments experienced by patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression have different etiologies requiring the development of distinct interventions, or whether similar treatments would be effective for all three clinical groups. Therefore, a better understanding of how these deficits are associated with neurobiological abnormalities across diagnostic groups is an important next step in efforts to intervene on and remediate cognitive impairment. The current project directly addresses this step by assessing differences in brain network organization across diagnostic groups, and testing hypotheses about how those differences relate to cognitive ability. Research has shown that the organization and integrity of functional brain networks supports cognitive functions such as memory, executive functioning, and processing speed. Therefore, we hypothesize that the organization of those networks could provide critical insights into neurobiological abnormalities associated with mental illness. The first aim of the study will measure the efficiency of functional networks believed to support higher-order cognition, the fronto-parietal network (FPN) and the cingulo- opercular network (CON), in individuals with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and healthy controls. Differences in network efficiency, calculated using graph theoretic algorithms, will be used to predict performance on tasks of working memory, episodic memory, executive function, and processing speed, within and across diagnostic group. Additionally, the second aim of the study will look at specific brain regions known as hubs, which are particularly important for transmittin information between networks. The degree to which a hub node communicates with other networks will be used to predict cognitive performance as well, to gain a better sense of whether reductions in the participation of specific brain regions influences cognitive performance. We predict that these relationships will hold both within and across diagnostic group, and that no interactions with group will be observed, based on the hypothesis that relationships between cognition and network metrics are similar across diagnostic groups, but that the magnitude of those metrics differs in a graded fashion (controls>depression>bipolar>schizophrenia). Through these two aims, we can gain a more complex understanding of how functional brain network organization is associated with cognitive deficits, and also whether these relationships differ depending on one's diagnostic status. With this information, more targeted predictions can be made regarding the specificity of abnormalities across mental health disorders and therefore the types of treatments necessary for addressing cognitive impairments in these clinical populations.