Altered Brain Activity in Patients With Comitant Strabismus Detected by Analysis of the Fractional Amplitude of Low-Frequency Fluctuation: A Resting-State Functional MRI Study

Abstract

More and more studies showed that strabismus is not simply an ocular disease, but a neuro-ophthalmology disease. To analyze potential changes in brain activity and their relationship to behavioral performance in comitant strabismus patients and healthy controls. Our study recruited 28 patients with comitant strabismus and 28 people with matched weight, age range, and sex ratio as healthy controls. Using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging, we evaluated fALFF to compare spontaneous brain activity between comitant strabismus and healthy controls. We did hospital anxiety and depression scale questionnaires for these patients. We found significantly lower fALFF value in comitant strabismus patients compared with controls in the left frontal superior medial gyrus and the right middle cingulum. In the latter region, fALFF was significantly negatively correlated with the hospital anxiety and depression scale, as well as the duration of disease. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis indicated that the fALFF method has clear potential for the diagnosis of comitant strabismus patients. These results revealed abnormal spontaneous activity in two brain regions of comitant strabismus patients, which may indicate underlying pathologic mechanisms and may help to advance clinical treatment.

Bidirectional associations between hyperopia, myopia, astigmatism, and strabismus, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in children: a national population-based cohort study

“… 26 Interestingly, a functional magnetic resonance imaging study found that, compared to controls, individuals with strabismus had significantly lower fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation values in the left frontal superior medial gyrus and the right middle cingulum. 27 These studies suggest that strabismus and ADHD may share common structural anomalies in the central nervous system. Second, shared risk factors might account for the associations between ADHD and ophthalmological diseases.…”

Fractional amplitude of low‐frequency fluctuation changes of specific cerebral regions in patients with toothache: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study

“…In particular, rs‐fMRI has been used widely in the field of neuroscience and neuropsychiatric diseases because it reflects the spontaneous neural activity of the human brain (Biswal et al., 1995 ). fALFF divides the energy of the calculated low‐frequency signal by the power of the whole frequency band, which effectively addresses the disadvantages of ALFF and improves the sensitivity and specificity of spontaneous neural activity signal detection (Hu et al., 2022 ). Moreover, the fALFF method has successfully been applied to several pain‐related diseases and is expected to have wide prospects (Table 3 ) (Dai et al., 2020 ; Li et al., 2021 ; Schneider et al., 2020 ; Wang et al., 2016 ; Zhang et al., 2019 , 2021 ).…”

“…fALFF divides the energy of the calculated low-frequency signal by the power of the whole frequency band, which effectively addresses the disadvantages of ALFF and improves the sensitivity and specificity of spontaneous neural activity signal detection (Hu et al, 2022).…”