Children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder spend more time in hyperconnected network states and less time in segregated network states as revealed by dynamic connectivity analysis

Previous studies in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have observed functional brain network disruption on a whole-brain level, as well as on a sub-network level, particularly as related to the default mode network, attention-related networks, and cognitive control-related networks. Given behavioral findings that children with ADHD have more difficulty sustaining attention and more extreme moment-to-moment fluctuations in behavior than typically developing (TD) children, recently developed methods to assess changes in connectivity over shorter time periods (i.e., "dynamic functional connectivity"), may provide unique insight into dysfunctional network organization in ADHD. Thus, we performed a dynamic functional connectivity (FC) analysis on resting state fMRI data from 38 children with ADHD and 79 TD children. We used Hidden semi-Markov models (HSMMs) to estimate six network states, as well as the most probable sequence of states for each participant. We quantified the dwell time, sojourn time, and transition probabilities across states. We found that children with ADHD spent less total time in, and switched more quickly out of, anticorrelated states involving the default mode network and task-relevant networks as compared to TD children. Moreover, children with ADHD spent more time in a hyperconnected state as compared to TD children. These results provide novel evidence that underlying dynamics may drive the differences in static FC patterns that have been observed in ADHD and imply that disrupted FC dynamics may be a mechanism underlying the behavioral symptoms and cognitive deficits commonly observed in children with ADHD.

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