The two groups have no significant difference in sex (chi-square test, P > 0.05), age analyses of variance (ANOVA, P > 0.05), and education (two samples t-test, P > 0.05). The detailed demographics of these two groups are shown in Table ​Table11. Table 1 Subject demographics All patients met the following inclusion criteria: (1) Current MDD attack as assessed by two experienced psychiatrists using Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical the Structural Clinical Interview for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV); (2) 18–45 years of age; (3) right-handed Han Chinese; (4) HAMD scores of at least 17. Patients and healthy controls were excluded if they had any of the following: (1) a history of neurological diseases or other serious physical diseases;

(2) a history of electroconvulsive therapy; (3) history of substance abuse (i.e., drugs, alcohol, and other psychoactive substance); (4) any contraindications for MRI. This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Second Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Hunan, China. Written informed consent was obtained

Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical from all subjects. Imaging acquisitions and data preprocessing All image data were acquired using a 1.5T Siemens GE Signa Twinspeed Scanner (General Electric Medical System, Milwaukee, WI). The resting-state Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical fMRI was performed with a gradient-echo echo planar sequence. Subjects were asked to relax and think of nothing in particular with eyes closed but were requested not to fall asleep. A total of 180 volumes of echo-planar imagings were obtained axially (repetition time, 2000 msec; echo time, 40 msec; slices, 20; thickness, 5 mm; gap, 1 mm; field of view (FOV), 24′24 cm2; resolution, 64′64; Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical flip angle, 90 degrees). Prior to preprocessing, the first 10 volumes were discarded to allow for scanner stabilization and the subjects’ adaptation to the environment. fMRI data preprocessing was then conducted by SPM8 (http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm) and a data processing assistant for resting-state fMRI (DPARSF) (Yan and Zang 2010).

Briefly, the remaining functional scans were first Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical corrected for within-scan acquisition time differences between slices, and then realigned to the middle volume to correct for interscan head motions. Subsequently, the functional scans were spatially normalized 3-mercaptopyruvate sulfurtransferase by using T1 image unified segmentation (done by DPARSF directly) and HIF-1 cancer resampled to 3 × 3×3 mm3. After normalization, the BOLD signal of each voxel was first detrended to abandon a linear trend and then passed through a band-pass filter (0.01–0.08 Hz) to reduce low-frequency drift and high-frequency physiological noise. Finally, nuisance covariates including head motion parameters, global mean signals, white matter signals, and cerebrospinal signals were regressed out from the BOLD signals. The masks of three ROIs related to the hate circuit (left SFGdor, right INS, and right PUT) were generated using the free software WFU_PickAtlas (http://www.ansir.wfubmc.edu) (Maldjian et al. 2003).