Graded changes in local functional connectivity of the cerebral cortex in young people with depression

Abstract

Background Major depressive disorder (MDD) is marked by significant changes to the local synchrony of spontaneous neural activity across various brain regions. However, many methods for assessing this local connectivity use fixed or arbitrary neighborhood sizes, resulting in a decreased capacity to capture smooth changes to the spatial gradient of local correlations. A newly developed method sensitive to classical anatomo-functional boundaries, Iso-Distant Average Correlation (IDAC), was therefore used to examine depression associated alterations to the local functional connectivity of the brain. Method One-hundred and forty-seven adolescents and young adults with MDD and 94 healthy controls..