The association between stress and mood across the adult lifespan on default mode network

Abstract

Aging of brain structure and function is a complex process characterized by high inter- and intra-individual variability. Such variability may arise from the interaction of multiple factors, including exposure to stressful experience and mood variation, across the lifespan. Using a multimodal neuroimaging and neurocognitive approach, we investigated the association of stress, mood and their interaction, in the structure and function of the default mode network (DMN), both during rest and task-induced deactivation, throughout the adult lifespan. Data confirmed a decreased functional connectivity (FC) and task-induced deactivation of the DMN during the aging process and in subjects with lower mood; on the contrary, an increased FC was observed in subjects with higher perceived stress. Surprisingly, the association of aging with DMN was altered by stress and mood in specific regions. An increased difficulty to deactivate the DMN was noted in older participants with lower mood, contrasting with an increased deactivation in individuals presenting high stress, independently of their mood levels, with aging. Interestingly, this constant interaction across aging was globally most significant in the combination of high stress levels with a more depressed mood state, both during resting state and task-induced deactivations. The present results contribute to characterize the spectrum of FC and deactivation patterns of the DMN, highlighting the crucial association of stress and mood levels, during the adult aging process. These combinatorial approaches may help to understand the heterogeneity of the aging process in brain structure and function and several states that may lead to neuropsychiatric disorders.

Adjunct ketamine treatment effects on treatment-resistant depressive symptoms in chronic treatment-resistant schizophrenia patients are short-term and disassociated from regional homogeneity changes in key brain regions – a pilot study

“…Previous studies reporting that a single ketamine treatment may alleviate treatment resistant depression by normalizing aberrant activity in DMN components and the frontal cortex [66][67][68]. Although it is well established that ketamine can decrease functional activity in the DMN and other brain regions [47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60], we found increased ReHo in the DMN in CTRS patients with TRD symptoms in this pilot study. We postulated that this seemingly contradictory finding may be related to neuropathological features of schizophrenia.…”

“…The mPFC, anterior cingulate, posterior cingulate, precuneus, and angular gyrus, which have been identified as components of the DMN, and the OFC, which is part of the affective network, are key regions related to mood processing [47][48][49][50]. Notably, neural activities in the DMN and OFC have been reported to be markedly decreased in depressive patients [51][52][53][54][55][56].…”

A Hitchhiker's Guide to Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

“…While straightforward to implement in single-subject analyses, group ICA analyses are more complex and require choosing between several different workflows and algorithm definitions (Beckmann and Smith, 2004; Calhoun et al, 2009; Schöpf et al, 2010; Du et al, 2016). ICA methods also have been used extensively in rs-fMRI studies (Beckmann et al, 2005; Soares et al, 2016), task-based fMRI (Calhoun et al, 2008), and for artifact removal (Perlbarg et al, 2007; Feis et al, 2015; Pruim et al, 2015). …”

“…For this reason, resting state fMRI (rs-fMRI) analyses rely upon spontaneous coupled brain activity to reveal intrinsic signal fluctuations in the absence of external stimuli or demands of imposed tasks (Damoiseaux et al, 2006; Fox and Raichle, 2007; Schölvinck et al, 2010; van den Heuvel and Hulshoff Pol, 2010; Friston et al, 2014b). Complimentary approaches, combining rs-fMRI with functional deactivation (shifting from periods of stimulation to those of rest) also have been described to study functional activity transitions (Greicius and Menon, 2004; Anticevic et al, 2012; Soares et al, 2016). …”

Stress Changes the Resting-State Cortical Flow of Information from Distributed to Frontally Directed Patterns

“…Despite converging evidence on the involvement of these distributed networks in brain responses to stress [14,16,17], the effect of stress on their components is less clear [13,18]. For instance, considering the change in the brain activation, whereas Pruessner et al [19] and Koric et al [20] reported an elevated frontal activity in response to stress, Albert et al [21] and Qin et al [9] observed an opposite effect in this region.…”