PubMed ID
21655197
UMMS Affiliation
Department of Neurology
Date
6-2011
Document Type
Article
Subjects
Adolescent; Adult; Bipolar Disorder; Female; Humans; Male; Middle Aged; Motor Activity; Young Adult
Disciplines
Life Sciences | Medicine and Health Sciences | Neurology
Abstract
Scale invariance is a feature of complex biological systems, and abnormality of multi-scale behaviour may serve as an indicator of pathology. The hypothalamic suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) is a major node in central neural networks responsible for regulating multi-scale behaviour in measures of human locomotor activity. SCN also is implicated in the pathophysiology of bipolar disorder (BD) or manic-depressive illness, a severe, episodic disorder of mood, cognition and behaviour. Here, we investigated scaling behaviour in actigraphically recorded human motility data for potential indicators of BD, particularly its manic phase. A proposed index of scaling behaviour (Vulnerability Index [VI]) derived from such data distinguished between: [i] healthy subjects at high versus low risk of mood disorders; [ii] currently clinically stable BD patients versus matched controls; and [iii] among clinical states in BD patients.
Comments
Citation: Indic P, Salvatore P, Maggini C, Ghidini S, Ferraro G, et al. (2011) Scaling Behavior of Human Locomotor Activity Amplitude: Association with Bipolar Disorder. PLoS ONE 6(5): e20650. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0020650. Link to article on publisher's site
Copyright: © 2011 Indic et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.