Altered effective connectivity in patients with drug-naïve first-episode, recurrent, and medicated major depressive disorder: A multi-site fMRI study.

Background: Major depressive disorder (MDD) has been diagnosed through subjective and inconsistent clinical assessments. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) with connectivity analysis has been valuable for identifying neural correlates of patients with MDD, yet most studies rely on single-site and small sample sizes.

Methods: This study utilized large-scale, multi-site rs-fMRI data from the Rest-meta-MDD consortium to assess effective connectivity in patients with MDD and its subtypes, i.e., drug-naïve first-episode (FEDN), recurrent (RMDD), and medicated MDD (MMDD) subtypes. To mitigate site-related variability, the ComBat algorithm was applied, and multivariate linear regression was used to control for age and gender effects. A random forest classification model was developed to identify the most predictive features. Nested five-fold cross-validation was used to assess model performance.

Results: The model effectively distinguished FEDN subtype from healthy controls (HC) group, achieving 90.13 % accuracy and 96.41 % AUC. However, classification performance for RMDD vs. FEDN and MMDD vs. FEDN was lower, suggesting that differences between the subtypes were less pronounced than differences between the patients with MDD and the HC group. Patients with RMDD exhibited more extensive connectivity abnormalities in the frontal-limbic system and default mode network than the patients with FEDN, implying heightened rumination. Additionally, treatment with medication appeared to partially modulate the aberrant connectivity, steering it toward normalization.

Conclusion: This study showed altered brain connectivity in patients with MDD and its subtypes, which could be classified with machine learning models with robust performance. Abnormal connectivity could be the potential neural correlates for the presenting symptoms of patients with MDD. These findings provide novel insights into the neural pathogenesis of patients with MDD.