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The role of the amygdala during emotional processing in Huntington's disease: from pre-manifest to late stage disease.

ABSTRACT: Deficits in emotional processing can be detected in the pre-manifest stage of Huntington's disease and negative emotion recognition has been identified as a predictor of clinical diagnosis. The underlying neuropathological correlates of such deficits are typically established using correlative structural MRI studies. This approach does not take into consideration the impact of disruption to the complex interactions between multiple brain circuits on emotional processing. Therefore, exploration of the neural substrates of emotional processing in pre-manifest HD using fMRI connectivity analysis may be a useful way of evaluating the way brain regions interrelate in the period prior to diagnosis.We investigated the impact of predicted time to disease onset on brain activation when participants were exposed to pictures of faces with angry and neutral expressions, in 20 pre-manifest HD gene carriers and 23 healthy controls. On the basis of the results of this initial study went on to look at amygdala dependent cognitive performance in 79 Huntington's disease patients from a cross-section of disease stages (pre-manifest to late disease) and 26 healthy controls, using a validated theory of mind task: "the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test" which has been previously been shown to be amygdala dependent.Psychophysiological interaction analysis identified reduced connectivity between the left amygdala and right fusiform facial area in pre-manifest HD gene carriers compared to controls when viewing angry compared to neutral faces. Change in PPI connectivity scores correlated with predicted time to disease onset (r=0.45, p<0.05). Furthermore, performance on the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test" correlated negatively with proximity to disease onset and became progressively worse with each stage of disease.Abnormalities in the neural networks underlying social cognition and emotional processing can be detected prior to clinical diagnosis in Huntington's disease. Connectivity between the amygdala and other brain regions is impacted by the disease process in pre-manifest HD and may therefore be a useful way of identifying participants who are approaching a clinical diagnosis. Furthermore, the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test" is a surrogate measure of amygdala function that is clinically useful across the entire cross-section of disease stages in HD.

SUBMITTER: Mason SL

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4415907 | biostudies-other | 2015 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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The role of the amygdala during emotional processing in Huntington's disease: from pre-manifest to late stage disease.

Mason Sarah L SL Zhang Jiaxiang J Begeti Faye F Guzman Natalie Valle NV Lazar Alpar S AS Rowe James B JB Barker Roger A RA Hampshire Adam A

Neuropsychologia 20150217

<h4>Background</h4>Deficits in emotional processing can be detected in the pre-manifest stage of Huntington's disease and negative emotion recognition has been identified as a predictor of clinical diagnosis. The underlying neuropathological correlates of such deficits are typically established using correlative structural MRI studies. This approach does not take into consideration the impact of disruption to the complex interactions between multiple brain circuits on emotional processing. There ...[more]

PMID: 25700742

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Project description:Huntington's disease is an inherited neurodegenerative disease that causes motor, cognitive and psychiatric impairment, including an early decline in ability to recognize emotional states in others. The pathophysiology underlying the earliest manifestations of the disease is not fully understood; the objective of our study was to clarify this. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate changes in brain mechanisms of emotion recognition in pre-manifest carriers of the abnormal Huntington's disease gene (subjects with pre-manifest Huntington's disease): 16 subjects with pre-manifest Huntington's disease and 14 control subjects underwent 1.5 tesla magnetic resonance scanning while viewing pictures of facial expressions from the Ekman and Friesen series. Disgust, anger and happiness were chosen as emotions of interest. Disgust is the emotion in which recognition deficits have most commonly been detected in Huntington's disease; anger is the emotion in which impaired recognition was detected in the largest behavioural study of emotion recognition in pre-manifest Huntington's disease to date; and happiness is a positive emotion to contrast with disgust and anger. Ekman facial expressions were also used to quantify emotion recognition accuracy outside the scanner and structural magnetic resonance imaging with voxel-based morphometry was used to assess the relationship between emotion recognition accuracy and regional grey matter volume. Emotion processing in pre-manifest Huntington's disease was associated with reduced neural activity for all three emotions in partially separable functional networks. Furthermore, the Huntington's disease-associated modulation of disgust and happiness processing was negatively correlated with genetic markers of pre-manifest disease progression in distributed, largely extrastriatal networks. The modulated disgust network included insulae, cingulate cortices, pre- and postcentral gyri, precunei, cunei, bilateral putamena, right pallidum, right thalamus, cerebellum, middle frontal, middle occipital, right superior and left inferior temporal gyri, and left superior parietal lobule. The modulated happiness network included postcentral gyri, left caudate, right cingulate cortex, right superior and inferior parietal lobules, and right superior frontal, middle temporal, middle occipital and precentral gyri. These effects were not driven merely by striatal dysfunction. We did not find equivalent associations between brain structure and emotion recognition, and the pre-manifest Huntington's disease cohort did not have a behavioural deficit in out-of-scanner emotion recognition relative to controls. In addition, we found increased neural activity in the pre-manifest subjects in response to all three emotions in frontal regions, predominantly in the middle frontal gyri. Overall, these findings suggest that pathophysiological effects of Huntington's disease may precede the development of overt clinical symptoms and detectable cerebral atrophy.

Project description:Huntington's disease (HD) is a genetic neurodegenerative disorder that affects not only the motor but also the cognitive domain. In particular, cognitive symptoms such as impaired executive skills and deficits in recognizing other individuals' mental state may emerge many years before the motor symptoms. This study was aimed at testing two cognitive hypotheses suggested by previous research with a new Stroop task created for the purpose: 1) the impairment of emotion recognition in HD is moderated by the emotions' valence, and 2) inhibitory control is impaired in HD. Forty manifest and 20 pre-manifest HD patients and their age- and gender-matched controls completed both the traditional "Stroop Color and Word Test" (SCWT) and the newly created "Stroop Emotion Recognition under Word Interference Task" (SERWIT), which consist in 120 photographs of sad, calm, or happy faces with either congruent or incongruent word interference. On the SERWIT, impaired emotion recognition in manifest HD was moderated by emotion type, with deficits being larger in recognizing sadness and calmness than in recognizing happiness, but it was not moderated by stimulus congruency. On the SCWT, six different interference scores yielded as many different patterns of group effects. Overall our results corroborate the hypothesis that impaired emotion recognition in HD is moderated by the emotions' valence, but do not provide evidence for the hypothesis that inhibitory control is impaired in HD. Further research is needed to learn more about the psychological mechanisms underlying the moderating effect of emotional valence on impaired emotion recognition in HD, and to corroborate the hypothesis that the inhibitory processes involved in Stroop tasks are not impaired in HD. Looking beyond this study, the SERWIT promises to make important contributions to disentangling the cognitive and the psychomotor aspects of neurological disorders. The research was approved by the Ethics Committee of the "Istituto Leonarda Vaccari", Rome on January 24, 2018.

Dataset Information

The role of the amygdala during emotional processing in Huntington's disease: from pre-manifest to late stage disease.

Publications

The role of the amygdala during emotional processing in Huntington's disease: from pre-manifest to late stage disease.

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