Effects of Ncl. Basalis Meynert volume on the Trail‐Making‐Test are restricted to the left hemisphere

Abstract

BackgroundCortical acetylcholine released from cells in the basal forebrain facilitates cue detection and improves attentional performance. Cholinergic fibres to the cortex originate from the CH4 cell group, sometimes referred to as the Nucleus basalis of Meynert and the Nucleus subputaminalis of Ayala. The aim of this work was to investigate the effects of volumes of cholinergic nuclei on attention and executive function.MethodsThe volumes of CH4 and CH4p subregions were measured in a subgroup of 38 subjects (33.5 ± 11 years, 20 females) from a population‐based cohort study of smokers and never‐smokers who have undergone additional MR imaging. To define regions of interest, we applied a DARTEL‐based procedure implemented in SPM8 and a validated probabilistic map of the basal forebrain. Attention and executive function were measured with Trail‐Making Test (TMT A+B) and Stroop‐Task.ResultsWe found a quadratic effect of the left CH4 subregion on performance of the TMT. Extremely small as well as extremely large volumes are associated with poor test performance.ConclusionsOur results indicate that a small CH4 volume predisposes for a hypocholinergic state, whereas an extremely large volume predisposes for a hypercholinergic state. Both extremes have detrimental effects on attention. Comparable nonlinear effects have already been reported in pharmacological studies on the effects cholinergic agonists on attention.

Functional Subdivisions of Magnocellular Cell Groups in Human Basal Forebrain: Test–Retest Resting-State Study at Ultra-high Field, and Meta-analysis

“…(Zaborszky et al 2008). The simple subdivisions are reproducible and have been validated in several studies (Butler et al 2013(Butler et al , 2014(Butler et al , 2018Li et al 2014;Kline et al 2016;Lammers et al 2016;Cantero et al 2017;Zhang et al 2017). Since the postmortem probabilistic maps were constructed primarily based on the presence of large neurons that are mostly cholinergic (see discussion in Zaborszky et al (2008)), the BF space considered in this study is also called BF cholinergic space.…”

Basal forebrain cholinergic system volume is associated with general cognitive ability in the elderly

“…We have previously described the segmentation method we used for the volumetry of the BFCS (Lammers et al, 2016). Butler et al (2014) described a similar method and they were able to show that the results are comparable to manual segmentation techniques.…”

Challenges and potential of 7T (f)MRI for investigating attention and perception

“…Note that the CS and CE do not have units and their conversion to cubic millimetres were not reported. To visualise the wide range of CS or CE, we listed these partial reports from the papers: the extent of atrophy between patients and the healthy control group were reported to be 312 in left Ch4 and 365 in right Ch4/Ch4p ( S2.1) reported the nbM volume, they did so by using metrics without a physical unit or a conversion to cubic millimetres (Barrett et al 2018;Lammers et al 2016;Nemy et al 2020;Schmitz et al 2018;Schmitz and Nathan Spreng 2016;Wang et al 2019).…”