shown a relatively well-preserved, gross brain morphology, based on structural imaging and
postmortem studies. The insights gained from fMRI studies of such conditions are already being
used to elucidate the pathophysiology of mood, anxiety, psychotic, and addictive disorders and
the mechanisms of psychopharmacological treatments for these conditions (Fig. 1.15-8). They
may ultimately guide pathophysiology-based classification of psychiatric phenotypes for genetic
and treatment outcome studies.
Psychiatric disorders that manifest a recurrent, episodic nature and responsiveness to treatment
(eg, mood and anxiety disorders arising in early to midlife) appear particularly tractable to fMRI
studies, because they permit imaging in symptomatic and asymptomatic states. The physiological
correlates of symptoms or state-related cognitive biases and emotional responses can be
distinguished from the pathophysiological changes that may underlie the tendency to develop
illness episodes. Moreover, because many symptoms of these disorders (eg, depressed and
anxious mood) reflect distortions of emotional states that can be expressed by healthy subjects,
the nature of neurophysiological changes related to the pathological emotional state can be
explored by imaging healthy subjects during experimentally induced sadness or anxiety.
In contrast, some other psychiatric conditions are less well suited for application of some fMRI
techniques. For example, depression arising secondary to cerebrovascular disease presents
serious problems for studies assessing BOLD contrast, because varying degrees of
cerebrovascular involvement of tissue alter the relationships between CBF, CBV, and oxygen
extraction in complex ways, potentially confounding interpretation of abnormalities in the
BOLD signal. This problem appears to extend to depressives whose age-at-illness onset is older
than 55 years of age, who are highly likely to exhibit more numerous and extensive MR signal
hyperintensities in the deep and periventricular white matter in T2-weighted structural images
compared to age-matched, healthy controls or age-matched, early-onset depressives. Tissue
acquired postmortem from subjects manifesting patch- and cap-shaped areas of MR signal
hyperintensity consistently show arteriosclerosis, gliosis, white matter necrosis, and axon loss
within the affected areas but not in surrounding tissue in which the MRI signal appears normal.
Regional CBF is decreased in the areas at which patches or large caps of white matter
hyperintensity (WMH) are evident in MR images. The personal and family risk factors for
developing such WMH patches and late-onset depression are risk factors for cerebrovascular
disease, and the left frontal cortical areas at which infarction has been associated with an
increased risk of major depression are the areas most commonly affected by WMH in late-onset
major depressive disorder. Such cases must be studied separately from early-onset cases in a
variety of neuroimaging studies, because cerebrovascular disease profoundly alters the
relationships between CBF, metabolism, oxygen extraction, and hemodynamic regulation.
Psychotropic Drug Effects on fMRI
A variety of psychotropic drugs are also expected to influence hemodynamic parameters,
potentially confounding the results of fMRI studies. For example, CBF and metabolism can be
reduced by acute and chronic administration of benzodiazepine receptor agonists and
antipsychotic drugs. In addition, agents that affect vascular tone may alter CBV, especially in the
venous blood pool. Furthermore, chronic treatment with antidepressant, antipsychotic, and
antianxiety drugs exerts regionally specific effects on CBF, metabolism, or neuronal activity, or
a combination of these, in prefrontal cortical or limbic areas of interest that cannot be factored
out simply by applying global scaling. Consequently, studying subjects in a condition in which
they are medication free (for a period long enough to avoid treatment withdrawal effects)
becomes critical to the design of experiments involving psychiatric subjects.
fMRI studies can conversely be designed to investigate neurophysiological effects of
psychotropic treatments. By imaging before and during treatment, the effects of psychotropic
drugs on basal perfusion or hemodynamic responses to sensory and cognitive events can be
characterized. For example, chronic treatment with a variety of antidepressant drugs reduces the
abnormal elevation of amygdala CBF and metabolism in major depressive disorder toward
normal, an effect that is expected to be robust in images acquired using arterial spin labeling.
Moreover, the amygdala's hemodynamic response to emotionally valenced stimuli (eg, fearful
faces) has been shown to be markedly attenuated in major depressive disorder subjects after
chronic antidepressant drug treatment.
Application of fMRI in Clinical Psychiatry
In contrast to the use of fMRI in research applications, the clinical capabilities of these tools for
guiding diagnostic or treatment decisions have not been established. The abnormalities identified
by imaging studies of depression have thus far lacked effect sizes sufficient to provide sensitive
and specific discrimination of individual patients from healthy subjects or from subjects with
other illnesses. It remains unclear whether MRI techniques for high-resolution perfusion imaging
may ultimately identify abnormalities that can sensitively and specifically classify individual
patients.
MRS
The phenomenon known as chemical shift allows detection of different nuclei, as well as
differentiation of the same nuclei in different chemical environments. Unlike MRI, in which the
resonance frequency of dominant water protons is detected, MRS detects signals as much as
10,000 to 100,000 times less concentrated, allowing noninvasive assay of specific, biologically
relevant molecules in vivo.