Abstract

The aetiology of suicidal behaviour is complex, and knowledge about its neurobiological mechanisms is limited. Neuroimaging methods provide a noninvasive approach to explore the neural correlates of suicide vulnerability in vivo. The ENIGMA-MDD Working Group is an international collaboration evaluating neuroimaging and clinical data from thousands of individuals collected by research groups from around the world. Here we present analyses in a subset sample (n = 3097) for whom suicidality data were available. Prevalence of suicidal symptoms among major depressive disorder (MDD) cases ranged between 29 and 69% across cohorts. We compared mean subcortical grey matter volumes, lateral ventricle volumes and total intracranial volume (ICV) in MDD patients with suicidal symptoms (N = 451) vs healthy controls (N = 1996) or MDD patients with no suicidal symptoms (N = 650). MDD patients reporting suicidal plans or attempts showed a smaller ICV (P = 4.12 x 10(-3)) or a 2.87% smaller volume compared with controls (Cohen's d = -0.284). In addition, we observed a nonsignificant trend in which MDD cases with suicidal symptoms had smaller subcortical volumes and larger ventricular volumes compared with controls. Finally, no significant differences (P = 0.28-0.97) were found between MDD patients with and those without suicidal symptoms for any of the brain volume measures. This is by far the largest neuroimaging meta-analysis of suicidal behaviour in MDD to date. Our results did not replicate previous reports of association between subcortical brain structure and suicidality and highlight the need for collecting better-powered imaging samples and using improved suicidality assessment instruments.

Authors	Renteria, M. E.; Schmaal, L.; Hibar, D. P.; Couvy-Duchesne, B.; Strike, L. T.; Mills, N. T.; de Zubicaray, G. I.; McMahon, K. L.; Medland, Sarah E.; Gillespie, N. A.; Hatton, S. N.; Lagopoulos, J.; Veltman, D. J.; van der Wee, N.; van Erp, T. G. M.; Wittfeld, K.; Grabe, H. J.; Block, A.; Hegenscheid, K.; Voelzke, H.; Veer, I. M.; Walter, H.; Schnell, K.; Schramm, E.; Normann, C.; Schoepf, D.; Konrad, C.; Zurowski, B.; Godlewska, B. R.; Cowen, P. J.; Penninx, B. W. J. H.; Jahanshad, N.; Thompson, P. M.; Wright, M. J.; Martin, N. G.; Christensen, H.; Hickie, I. B.
Journal	TRANSLATIONAL PSYCHIATRY
Pages
Volume	7
Date	1/05/2017
Grant ID	U54EB020403
Funding Body	NIH BD2K award
URL	http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=10.1038/tp.2017.84
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