Neuroimaging study reveals elevated thalamus-amygdala connectivity in bipolar disorder with problematic gaming, suggesting altered reward and emotional circuits.
Key Points
Investigate neural circuit and functional connectivity alterations associated with problematic gaming in individuals diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
Assessed 73 participants across three groups: bipolar disorder with problematic gaming (BD-PG, n = 26), bipolar disorder without problematic gaming (BD-NPG, n = 23), and healthy controls (HC, n = 24).
Administered clinical and gaming severity instruments (VGD-S, BDI-II, YMRS) alongside resting-state fMRI scans to evaluate seed-based functional connectivity across emotion, reward, and cognitive control circuits.
Conducted ANCOVA with false discovery rate (FDR) correction and partial correlation analyses adjusting for age, education duration, and medication burden.
Functional connectivity between the left thalamus and right amygdala was significantly increased in the BD-PG group compared with both the BD-NPG and HC groups, and in the BD-NPG group compared with HC after FDR correction.
Partial correlation analysis demonstrated that increased left thalamus-right amygdala functional connectivity was positively associated with higher VGD-S gaming dependency scores after controlling for age, education, and medication burden.