Altered dynamic functional connectivity in antagonistic state in first-episode, drug-naive patients with major depressive disorder.

Abstract Major depressive disorder (MDD) is characterized by disrupted functional network connectivity (FNC), with unclear underlying dynamics. We investigated both static FNC (sFNC) and dynamic FNC (dFNC) on resting-state fMRI data from drug-naive first-episode MDD patients and healthy controls (HC). MDD patients exhibited lower sFNC within and between sensory and motor networks than HC. Four dFNC states were identified, including a globally-weakly-connected state, a cognitive-control-dominated state, a globally-positively-connected state, and an antagonistic state. The antagonistic state was marked by strong positive connections within the sensorimotor domain and their anti-correlations with the executive-motor control domain. Notably, MDD patients exhibited significantly longer time dwelling in the globally-weakly-connected state, at the cost of significantly shorter time dwelling in the antagonistic state. Further, only the mean dwell time of this antagonistic state was significantly anticorrelated to disease severity measures. Our study highlights the altered dynamics of the antagonistic state as a fundamental aspect of disrupted FNC in early MDD.