Pre- and post-task resting-state differs in clinical populations

Abstract

Resting-state functional connectivity has generated great hopes as a potential brain biomarker for improving prevention, diagnosis, and treatment in psychiatry. This neuroimaging protocol can routinely be performed by patients and does not depend on the specificities of a task. Thus, it seems ideal for big data approaches that require aggregating data across multiple studies and sites. However, technical variability, diverging data analysis approaches, and differences in data acquisition protocols might introduce heterogeneity to the aggregated data. Besides these technical aspects, the psychological state of participants might also contribute to heterogeneity. In healthy participants, studies have shown that behavioral tasks can influence resting-state measures, but such effects have not yet been reported in clinical populations. Here, we fill this knowledge gap by comparing resting-state functional connectivity before and after clinically relevant tasks in two clinical conditions, namely substance use disorders and phobias. The tasks consisted of viewing craving-inducing and spider anxiety provoking pictures that are frequently used in cue-reactivity studies and exposure therapy. We found distinct pre- vs. post-task resting-state connectivity differences in each group, as well as decreased thalamo-cortical and increased intra-thalamic connectivity which might be associated with decreased vigilance in both groups. Notably, the pre- vs. post-task thalamus-amygdala connectivity change within a patient cohort seems more pronounced than the difference of that connection between the smoker vs. phobia clinical trait. Our results confirm that resting-state measures can be strongly influenced by changes in psychological states that need to be taken into account when pooling resting-state scans for clinical biomarker detection. This demands that resting-state datasets should include a complete description of the experimental design, especially when a task preceded data collection.