Absence of default mode downregulation in response to a mild psychological stressor marks stress-vulnerability across diverse psychiatric disorders
Publication year
2020Author(s)
Number of pages
11 p.
Source
Neuroimage. Clinical, 25, (2020), article 102176ISSN
Publication type
Article / Letter to editor
Display more detailsDisplay less details
Organization
Psychiatry
PI Group Memory & Emotion
Cognitive Neuroscience
SW OZ BSI KLP
PI Group Motivational & Cognitive Control
PI Group Cognitive Affective Neuroscience
Journal title
Neuroimage. Clinical
Volume
vol. 25
Languages used
English (eng)
Subject
130 000 Cognitive Neurology & Memory; 170 000 Motivational & Cognitive Control; All institutes and research themes of the Radboud University Medical Center; Experimental Psychopathology and Treatment; Radboudumc 0: Other Research RIHS: Radboud Institute for Health Sciences; Radboudumc 13: Stress-related disorders DCMN: Donders Center for Medical NeuroscienceAbstract
Clinically, it is well-established that vulnerability to stress is a common feature across a broad spectrum of psychiatric disorders. However, this link has been mechanistically studied almost exclusively in patients with so-called stress-related disorders such as depression and anxiety. To probe transdiagnostic mechanisms, we set out to study the acute stress response across a broader range of psychiatric disorders taking a large-scale brain network perspective. We investigated the brain's response to a mild, experimentally well-controlled psychological stressor in the form of an aversive movie. We studied 168 patients with stress-related and/or neurodevelopmental disorders (including comorbidity) and 46 control subjects. We focused on three networks that have a central role in the brain's stress response and are affected in a wide range of psychiatric disorders: the salience network (SN), default mode network (DMN) and frontoparietal network (FPN). Our results support an increased vulnerability to stress across all patients, indicated by a higher subjective stress level at baseline and follow-up compared to matched controls. At the brain systems level, the stress response was characterized by a relatively decreased FPN connectivity and an absence of a decrease in the within DMN connectivity across all disorders compared to controls. At the neurocognitive level, these findings may reflect a diminished top-down control and a tendency to more pronounced (negative) self-referential processing. Besides these shared aspects of the maladaptive stress response, we also discuss indications for disorder-specific aspects. Taken together, our results emphasize the importance of investigating the mechanistic underpinnings of psychiatric disorders transdiagnostically as recently done in neurogenetics.
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
- Academic publications [238586]
- Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging [3828]
- Electronic publications [122845]
- Faculty of Medical Sciences [90409]
- Faculty of Social Sciences [29513]
- Open Access publications [97827]
Upload full text
Use your RU credentials (u/z-number and password) to log in with SURFconext to upload a file for processing by the repository team.