A pilot study exploring the association of morphological changes with 5-HTTLPR polymorphism in OCD patients

Shinichi Honda; Tomohiro Nakao; Hiroshi Mitsuyasu; Kayo Okada; Leo Gotoh; Mayumi Tomita; Hirokuni Sanematsu; Keitaro Murayama; Keisuke Ikari; Masumi Kuwano; Takashi Yoshiura; Hiroaki Kawasaki; Shigenobu Kanba

doi:10.1186/s12991-017-0126-6

A pilot study exploring the association of morphological changes with 5-HTTLPR polymorphism in OCD patients

Ann Gen Psychiatry. 2017 Jan 17:16:2. doi: 10.1186/s12991-017-0126-6. eCollection 2017.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Department of Neuropsychiatry, Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Kyushu University, 3-1-1 Maidashi Higashi-ku, Fukuoka, Japan.
² Department of Mental Retardation and Birth Defect Research, National Institute of Neuroscience, National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, Tokyo, Japan.
³ Kurume University Graduate School of Psychology, Fukuoka, Japan.
⁴ Department of Radiology, Graduate School of Medical and Dental Sciences, Kagoshima University, Kagoshima, Japan.
⁵ Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, Fukuoka University, Fukuoka, Japan.

Abstract

Background: Clinical and pharmacological studies of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) have suggested that the serotonergic systems are involved in the pathogenesis, while structural imaging studies have found some neuroanatomical abnormalities in OCD patients. In the etiopathogenesis of OCD, few studies have performed concurrent assessment of genetic and neuroanatomical variables.

Methods: We carried out a two-way ANOVA between a variable number of tandem repeat polymorphisms (5-HTTLPR) in the serotonin transporter gene and gray matter (GM) volumes in 40 OCD patients and 40 healthy controls (HCs).

Results: We found that relative to the HCs, the OCD patients showed significant decreased GM volume in the right hippocampus, and increased GM volume in the left precentral gyrus. 5-HTTLPR polymorphism in OCD patients had a statistical tendency of stronger effects on the right frontal pole than those in HCs.

Conclusions: Our results showed that the neuroanatomical changes of specific GM regions could be endophenotypes of 5-HTTLPR polymorphism in OCD.

Keywords: 5-HTTLPR; Frontal pole; Hippocampus; Imaging genetics; Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD); Precentral gyrus; Serotonin transporter gene; Voxel-based morphometry (VBM).