Aberrant Spontaneous Brain Activity in Coronary Heart Disease Using Fractional Amplitude of Low-Frequency Fluctuations: A Preliminary Resting-State Functional MRI Study

Abstract

Objective. This study is aimed at exploring the spontaneous brain activity changes by measuring the fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (fALFF) and their relationship with clinical characteristics in patients with coronary heart disease (CHD). Methods. Coronary heart disease patients ( n = 25 ) and age, gender, and education level-matched control subjects (controls, n = 35 ) were included. The grey matter volume (GMV) and fALFF values were calculated to assess the difference in brain structure and function between the two groups, respectively. Correlation analyses between the fALFF values and clinical characteristics were further assessed in CHD patients. In addition, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were conducted to access the diagnostic ability of the fALFF method. Results. There was no significant difference in GMV between the CHD and control groups. Compared with the control group, patients with CHD showed significantly decreased fALFF in the left precentral/postcentral gyrus and increased fALFF in the right inferior cerebellum. Patients with a history of myocardial infarction (MI) showed significantly decreased fALFF values of the right inferior cerebellum than patients without MI. There was no significant correlation between the fALFF values in specific brain regions and disease duration. Furthermore, the ROC curves of abnormal brain regions showed the perfect accuracy of the fALFF value in distinguishing between CHD patients and controls. Conclusion. CHD demonstrated aberrant neural activity in specific brain regions mainly related to sensorimotor networks and pain processing, which may contribute to understanding the underlying neurological mechanism of CHD.

Effect of cardiovascular diseases on brain functional changes and cognition: a systematic review of fMRI studies

“…Previously, MRI studies focused on structural brain alterations in patients with CHD and revealed white matter lesions, grey matter atrophy, and changes in cerebral blood ow. However, not much is known about the functional changes in brain activity [22]. Researching the potential effects of CVD on brain function can be better explored through measurements of neural activity using fMRI.…”

“…For instance, rs-fMRI, a non-invasive, neural activity assessment method, has been widely used to measure spontaneous neural activity independent of task stimulation constraints by detecting blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signals. Current research on pain mechanisms and neuropsychiatric illnesses has used ALFF and fALFF analyses extensively to demonstrate anomalies in brain activity through spontaneous neural activity [22]. Data-driven techniques like ReHo and fALFF are frequently employed to measure regional spontaneous brain activity.…”

“…CVD subjects showed comparatively diminished cognitive scores than HCs in both MoCA (17.18 ± 3.13; 28.18 ± 1.33) and MMSE (20.45 ± 4.01; 26.73 ± 1.74). In terms of clinical characteristics, 5 studies reported BMI, whereof, the BMI in CVD subjects ranged from 23.71 ± 2.62 [22] to 31.3 ± 6.4 (Chuang, 2014). In addition, only 3 studies reported the mean LDL and HDL cholesterol values, and 3 studies included the mean EF percentile.…”

“…Resting State fMRI Among the 9 studies, 4 of them performed resting-state fMRI, whereof, 2 studies [7,22] reported sensorimotor networks (SMN), and another study [17] reported the default mode network (DMN). Wei and colleagues (2023) investigated the thalamus-based functional connectivity (FC) patterns in patients with CHD.…”

Intrinsic brain abnormalities in chronic rhinosinusitis associated with mood and cognitive function

“…Neuroimaging has proven to be a non-invasive tool for exploring the in vivo human brain, helping to detect the functional abnormalities in the brain at an early stage of various diseases (Lui et al, 2016). Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) is a powerful and safe neuroimaging approach that inspects the changes in intrinsic neural activity via measurement of blood-oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal without task performance during the examination (Guo et al, 2022;Lin et al, 2022). Both amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (ALFF) and regional homogeneity (ReHo) are crucial techniques to explore aberrant brain activity (Zang et al, 2004;Guo et al, 2022).…”