Background

The human brain activity is inherently dynamic over time. Conventional neuroimaging studies have reported abnormalities of static intrinsic brain activity or connectivity in adolescent patients with conduct disorder (CD). Little is known, however, regarding the temporal dynamics alterations of brain activity in CD.

Methods

In this study, resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging examinations were performed on adolescent patients with pure CD and age-matched typically developing (TD) controls. The dynamic amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (dALFF) was first measured using a sliding-window method. The temporal variability (TV) was then quantified as the variance of dALFF over time and compared between the two groups. Further, the relationships between aberrant TV of dALFF and clinical features were evaluated.

Results

CD patients showed reduced brain dynamics (less temporal variability) in the default-mode network, frontal-limbic cortices, sensorimotor areas, and visual regions which are involved in cognitive, emotional and perceptional processes. Importantly, receiver operating characteristic curve analysis revealed that regions with altered TV of dALFF exhibited a better ability to distinguish CD patients than the results from static ALFF in the current data set.

Conclusions

Our findings extended previous work by providing a novel perspective on the neural mechanisms underlying adolescent patients with CD and demonstrated that the altered dynamic local brain activity may be a potential biomarker for CD diagnosis.

中文翻译：

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不仅仅是静力学：纯净品行障碍的青少年患者低频波动的动态幅度异常。

背景

人脑活动固有地随时间变化。常规的神经影像学研究已经报告了行为障碍（CD）的青少年患者的静态固有大脑活动或连接异常。然而，关于CD中大脑活动的时间动态变化知之甚少。

方法

在这项研究中，对患有纯CD和年龄相匹配的典型发育（TD）对照的青少年患者进行了静息状态功能磁共振成像检查。首先使用滑动窗口方法测量低频波动的动态幅度（dALFF）。然后将时间变异性（TV）量化为dALFF随时间的变化，并在两组之间进行比较。此外，评估了dALFF的异常TV与临床特征之间的关系。

结果

CD患者在默认模式网络，额叶-边缘皮质，感觉运动区域和涉及认知，情感和知觉过程的视觉区域显示出大脑动力学降低（时间变异性较小）。重要的是，接收机工作特性曲线分析表明，与当前数据集中静态ALFF结果相比，dALFF TV改变的区域表现出更好的区分CD患者的能力。

结论

我们的发现通过提供关于CD青春期患者潜在神经机制的新颖观点，扩展了以前的工作，并证明动态局部大脑活动的改变可能是CD诊断的潜在生物标记。