Abnormalities in the structural covariance of emotion regulation networks in major depressive disorder

Abstract Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a common psychiatric disorder that is characterized by cognitive deficits and affective symptoms. To date, an increasing number of neuroimaging studies have focused on emotion regulation and have consistently shown that emotion dysregulation is one of the central features and underlying mechanisms of MDD. Although gray matter morphological abnormalities in regions within emotion regulation networks have been identified in MDD, the interactions and relationships between these gray matter structures remain largely unknown. Thus, in this study, we adopted a structural covariance method based on gray matter volume to investigate the brain morphological abnormalities within the emotion regulation networks in a large cohort of 65 MDD patients and 65 age- and gender-matched healthy controls. A permutation test with p