A new study, and I don’t know what this RFI is exactly, and how robustly it reflects anything, but it’s curious. The study is by Chinese scientists, so I’m not sure about the quality of the study, but it somehow got published in a Cambridge journal, so it might be somewhat robust, I hope
Abstract
Background
Major psychiatric disorders (MPDs) are delineated by distinct clinical features. However, overlapping symptoms and transdiagnostic effectiveness of medications have challenged the traditional diagnostic categorisation. We investigate if there are shared and illness-specific disruptions in the regional functional efficiency (RFE) of the brain across these disorders.
Methods
We included 364 participants (118 schizophrenia [SCZ], 80 bipolar disorder [BD], 91 major depressive disorder [MDD], and 75 healthy controls [HCs]). Resting-state fMRI was used to caclulate the RFE based on the static amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation, regional homogeneity, and degree centrality and corresponding dynamic measures indicating variability over time. We used principal component analysis to obtain static and dynamic RFE values. We conducted functional and genetic annotation and enrichment analysis based on abnormal RFE profiles.
Results
SCZ showed higher static RFE in the cortico-striatal regions and excessive variability in the cortico-limbic regions. SCZ and MDD shared lower static RFE with higher dynamic RFE in sensorimotor regions than BD and HCs. We observed association between static RFE abnormalities with reward and sensorimotor functions and dynamic RFE abnormalities with sensorimotor functions. Differential spatial expression of genes related to glutamatergic synapse and calcium/cAMP signaling was more likely in the regions with aberrant RFE.
Conclusions
SCZ shares more regions with disrupted functional integrity, especially in sensorimotor regions, with MDD rather than BD. The neural patterns of these transdiagnostic changes appear to be potentially driven by gene expression variations relating to glutamatergic synapses and calcium/cAMP signaling. The aberrant sensorimotor, cortico-striatal, and cortico-limbic integrity may collectively underlie neurobiological mechanisms of MPDs.