ArticleJournal of neurology, neurosurgery, and psychiatry2026
Functional and effective connectivity disruptions of the dopaminergic reward circuit in multiple sclerosis patients with depression.
Article in Journal of neurology, neurosurgery, and psychiatry, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Heterogeneous brain alterations in treatment-resistant depression converge on common control networks.Neurotherapeutics : the journal of the American Society for Experimental NeuroTherapeutics · 2026Pooled it
- MRI Correlates of Depression and Anxiety in Multiple Sclerosis.Diseases (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Functional and effective connectivity alterations relate to cognitive performance in aquaporin-4 antibody-positive neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder.Brain communications · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundDespite the impact of depression in multiple sclerosis (MS), the neurobiological mechanisms underlying its pathogenesis are still poorly understood. Disrupted functional connectivity (FC) within the reward circuit has been observed in major depressive disorder (MDD), highlighting its essential role in the neurobiology of depression. Here, we hypothesised that an analogous dysconnectivity may underpin depression in MS.
methodsThe present study aimed to investigate FC of key nodes of the reward circuit (nucleus accumbens, NAcc and ventral tegmental area, VTA) in MS patients with depression (MS-D; n=30, 22 females), characterising differences with MS patients without depression (MS-nD; n=30, 17 females) and MDD patients without MS (n=30, 23 females). Furthermore, dynamic causal modelling (DCM) was applied to resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data to characterise effective connectivity (EC), which refers to the causal influences of brain regions involved in the circuit.
resultsMS-D group showed reduced FC compared with both MS-nD and MDD, suggesting that the association of depression with MS may reflect dysfunction of the reward circuit. The DCM analysis showed inhibitory self-connections, a negative modulation of VTA in MS-D>MS-nD, a negative modulation between VTA, NAcc and the right amygdala as an effect of having depression and no EC differences for MS-D>MDD.
conclusionsThe present connectivity study revealed promising results for understanding the pathophysiology of depression in MS. A combined FC-EC investigation of the reward circuit may represent a potential non-invasive in vivo MRI biomarker for understanding the onset of core depressive symptoms, supporting the development of effective and personalised therapies.
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