PS60. Associations between Pro-inflammatory cytokines and grey matter/ cortical thickness in patients with bipolar disorder Free

Abstract

Background: Gathered evidence suggested bipolar disorder and unipolar depression are both related to dysregulated inflammatory reaction. Our recent studies found bipolar disorder is with a more severe inflammatory dysregulation than the unipolar depression, with significantly higher levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, and pro-inflammatory cytokines, esp sTNF-R1, may be potential biomarkers that patients with subtype of bipolar disorder and different mood states. However, few studies investigated the association between pro-inflammatory cytokines and neuroimaging abnormalities in bipolar disorder in literatures.

Method: The study subjects were clinically stable patients with bipolar disorder, age from 18 to 65 years. They completed assessments of psychiatric symptoms, pro-inflammatory cytokines, and MRI assessments.

Results: In total, 75 patients with bipolar disorder were enrolled, with 64% female and average age of 42.7±10.4 years old. With controlling of age, gender, BMI, intracranial volume, and duration of illness, we found higher level of sTNF-R was associated with reduced grey matter volume over left Crus II、right Crus II, occipital pole, lateral Occipital Cortex, inferior division, planum temporale, supramarginal gyrus, posterior division, and higher level of sIL-6R was associated with reduced cortex thickness over the left middle temporal.

Conclusion: Negative correlations were found between level of sTNF-R and grey matter which involve carrying information about body movement between the cortex and the brain stem, auditory and linguistic processing, visual processing center and somatosensory association cortex; as well as the level of sIL-6R and cortex thickness over the left middle temporal, which involve processing sensory input into derived meanings for the appropriate retention of visual memories, language comprehension and emotion association. The results supported that pro-inflammatory cytokines could be biomarkers for neuroimaging abnormality in bipolar disorder.