Depression is proved to be associated with the dysfunction of prefrontal-limbic neural circuit, especially during emotion processing procedure. Related explorations have been undertaken from the aspects of abnormal activation and functional connectivity. However, the mechanism of the dysfunction of coordinated interactions remains unknown and is still a matter of debate. The present study gave direct evidence of this issue from the aspect of effective connectivity via dynamic causal modeling (DCM). 20 major depressive disorder (MDD) patients and 20 healthy controls were recruited to attend facial emotional stimulus during MEG recording. Bayesian model selection (BMS) was applied to choose the best model. Results under the optimal model showed that top-down endogenous effective connectivity from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) to the amygdala was greatly impaired in patients relative to health controls; while bottom-up endogenous effective connectivity from the amygdala to the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) as well as modulatory effective connectivity from ACC to DLPFC was significantly increased. We inferred the incapable DLPFC failed to exert influence on amygdala, and finally lead to enhanced amygdala-ACC and ACC-DLPFC bottom-up effects. Such impaired prefrontal-amygdala connectivity was supposed to be responsible for the dysfunction in MDD when dealing with emotional stimuli.
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