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Neural activity changes to emotional stimuli in healthy individuals under chronic use of clomipramine

¹ Departamento de Psiquiatria, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
² Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
³ Departamento de Psiquiatria, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
⁴ NIF - LIM44 - Departamento de Radiologia, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
⁵ Departamento de Farmacologia, Instituto de Ciências Biomédicas, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil; Laboratório de Investigações Médicas-23, Hospital das Clínicas, FMUSP, Brazil
⁶ Departamento de Psiquiatria, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil; Laboratório de Investigações Médicas-23, Hospital das Clínicas, FMUSP, Brazil

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed.

	Abstract

Abstract

Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies examined neural activity responses to emotive stimuli in healthy individuals after acute/subacute administration of antidepressants. We now report the effects of repeated use of the antidepressant clomipramine on fMRI data acquired during presentation of emotion-provoking and neutral stimuli on healthy volunteers. A total of 12 volunteers were evaluated with fMRI after receiving low doses of clomipramine for 4 weeks and again after 4 weeks of washout. Fear-, happiness-, anger-provoking and neutral pictures from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) were used. Data analysis was performed with statistical parametric mapping (P < 0.05). Paired t-test comparisons for each condition between medicated and unmedicated states showed, to negative valence paradigms, decrease in brain activity in the amygdala when participants were medicated. We also demonstrated, across both positive and negative valence paradigms, consistent decreases in brain activity in the medicated state in the anterior cingulate gyrus and insula. This is the first report of modulatory effects of repeated antidepressant use on the central representation of somatic states in response to emotions of both negative and positive valences in healthy individuals. Also, our results corroborate findings of antidepressant-induced temporolimbic activity changes to emotion-provoking stimuli obtained in studies of subjects treated acutely with such agents.

Key Words: clomipramine, emotions, functional MRI, healthy subjects, tricyclic antidepressive agents

First published on May 21, 2009
Journal of Psychopharmacology 2009, doi:10.1177/0269881109105786


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