Gong L, et al. – The aim of the present study was to explore the association between brain topology and short–term treatment responses in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). The altered brain functional topological organization in patients with MDD was related to the treatment response in the early phase of medication. The findings suggested that brain topology assessments could be considered a useful and convenient predictor of short–term antidepressant responses.

Methods

• For this study, 68 patients with MDD and 63 cognitively normal (CN) subjects were enlisted at baseline and underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scans.
• Graph theory analysis was utilized to inspect group differences in the whole-brain functional topological properties.
• The relationship between altered brain topology and the early antidepressant response was inspected.

Results

• According to the findings obtained, patients with MDD demonstrated lower normalized clustering coefficients, lower small-worldness scalars and increased nodal efficiencies in the default mode network and decreased nodal efficiencies in basal ganglia and hippocampal networks.
• After two weeks of antidepressant treatment, the decreased nodal efficiency in left hippocampus was negatively correlated with depressive severity at baseline and positively correlated with changes in the depressive scores.