Aberrant brain responses to emotionally valent words is normalised after cognitive behavioural therapy in female XXXX adolescents.

@entity1 @entity308
BACKGROUND: @entity308 in adolescence is debilitating with high recurrence in adulthood, yet its pathophysiological mechanism remains enigmatic. To examine the interaction between emotion, cognition and treatment, functional brain responses to sad and happy distractors in an affective go/no-go task were explored before and after Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) in @entity308 female adolescents, and healthy @entity1 . METHODS: Eighty-two Depressed and 24 healthy female adolescents, aged 12-17 years, performed a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) affective go/no-go task at baseline. @entity1 were instructed to withhold their responses upon seeing happy or sad words. Among these @entity1 , 13 @entity1 had CBT over approximately 30 weeks. These @entity1 and 20 matched controls then repeated the task. RESULTS: At baseline, increased activation in response to happy relative to neutral distractors was observed in the orbitofrontal cortex in @entity308 @entity1 which was normalised after CBT. No significant group differences were found behaviourally or in brain activation in response to sad distractors. Improvements in symptoms (mean: 9.31, 95% CI: 5.35-13.27) were related at trend-level to activation changes in orbitofrontal cortex. LIMITATIONS: In the follow-up section, a limited number of post-CBT @entity1 were recruited. CONCLUSIONS: To our knowledge, this is the first fMRI study addressing the effect of CBT in adolescent @entity308 . Although a bias toward negative information is widely accepted as a hallmark of @entity308 , aberrant brain hyperactivity to positive distractors was found and normalised after CBT. Research, assessment and treatment focused on positive stimuli could be a future consideration. Moreover, a pathophysiological mechanism distinct from @entity308 may be suggested and awaits further exploration.
