Abstract
Objectives
Little is known about potential differences in the pathophysiology of bipolar disorder (BD) across development. The present study aimed to characterize age‐related neural mechanisms of BD.
Methods
Youths and adults with and without BD (N=108, age range=9.8–55.9 years) completed an emotional face labeling task during fMRI acquisition. We leveraged three different fMRI analytic tools to identify age‐related neural mechanisms of BD, investigating (1) change in neural responses over the course of the task, (2) neural activation averaged across the entire task, and (3) amygdala functional connectivity.
Results
We found converging Diagnosis x Age patterns across all three analytic methods. Compared to healthy youths vs. adults, youths vs. adults with BD show an altered pattern in response to repeated presentation of emotional faces in medial prefrontal, amygdala, temporo‐parietal regions, as well as amygdala‐temporo‐parietal connectivity. Specifically, medial prefrontal and lingual activation decreases over the course of repeated emotional face presentations in healthy youths vs. adults but increases in youths with BD compared to adults with BD. Moreover, youths vs. adults with BD show less medial prefrontal activation and amygdala‐temporo‐parietal junction connectivity averaged over the task, but this difference is not found for healthy youths vs. adults.
Conclusion
Although longitudinal confirmation and replication will be necessary, these findings suggest that neural development may be aberrant in BD and that some neural mechanisms mediating BD may differ in adults vs. children with the illness.
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