1. Cellular and extracellular white matter abnormalities in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: a diffusion MRI study
- Author
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Marcelo C. Batistuzzo, Taís W. Tanamatis, Kang Ik Kevin Cho, Johanna Seitz-Holland, Renata de Melo Felipe da Silva, Maria Alice de Mathis, María M. Martín, Roseli G. Shavitt, Joshua E. Goldenberg, Juliana Belo Diniz, Maria Concepcion Garcia Otaduy, Carolina Cappi, Antonio Carlos Lopes, Marcelo Q. Hoexter, Ofer Pasternak, Euripedes Constantino Miguel, and Maria Paula Maziero
- Subjects
Oncology ,Adult ,Male ,medicine.medical_specialty ,Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder ,Cognitive Neuroscience ,050105 experimental psychology ,Article ,White matter ,03 medical and health sciences ,Young Adult ,0302 clinical medicine ,Obsessive compulsive ,Internal medicine ,Fractional anisotropy ,medicine ,Extracellular ,Humans ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and imaging ,Biological Psychiatry ,medicine.diagnostic_test ,business.industry ,05 social sciences ,Brain ,Magnetic resonance imaging ,Middle Aged ,Skeleton (computer programming) ,White Matter ,medicine.anatomical_structure ,Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging ,Diffusion Tensor Imaging ,Female ,Neurology (clinical) ,Age of onset ,business ,030217 neurology & neurosurgery ,Diffusion MRI - Abstract
Background While previous studies have implicated white matter (WM) as a core pathology of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), the underlying neurobiological processes remain elusive. This study used free-water (FW) imaging derived from diffusion magnetic resonance imaging to identify cellular and extracellular WM abnormalities in patients with OCD compared with control subjects. Next, we investigated the association between diffusion measures and clinical variables in patients. Methods We collected diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging and clinical data from 83 patients with OCD (56 women/27 men, age 37.7 ± 10.6 years) and 52 control subjects (27 women/25 men, age 32.8 ± 11.5 years). Fractional anisotropy (FA), FA of cellular tissue, and extracellular FW maps were extracted and compared between patients and control subjects using tract-based spatial statistics and voxelwise comparison in FSL Randomise. Next, we correlated these WM measures with clinical variables (age of onset and symptom severity) and compared them between patients with and without comorbidities and patients with and without psychiatric medication. Results Patients with OCD demonstrated lower FA (43.4% of the WM skeleton), lower FA of cellular tissue (31% of the WM skeleton), and higher FW (22.5% of the WM skeleton) compared with control subjects. We did not observe significant correlations between diffusion measures and clinical variables. Comorbidities and medication status did not influence diffusion measures. Conclusions Our findings of widespread FA, FA of cellular tissue, and FW abnormalities suggest that OCD is associated with microstructural cellular and extracellular abnormalities beyond the corticostriatothalamocortical circuits. Future multimodal longitudinal studies are needed to understand better the influence of essential clinical variables across the illness trajectory.
- Published
- 2021