Regional Neural Activity Changes in Parkinson’s Disease-Associated Mild Cognitive Impairment and Cognitively Normal Patients

Abstract

Purpose The aim of this study was to compare regional homogeneity (ReHo) changes in Parkinson’s disease mild cognitive impairment (PD-MCI) patients with respect to normal controls (NC) and those with cognitively normal PD (PD-CN). Further, the study investigated the relationship between ReHo changes in PD patients and neuropsychological variation. Patients and Methods Thirty PD-MCI, 19 PD-CN, and 21 NC subjects were enrolled. Resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging data of all subjects were collected, and regional brain activity was measured for ReHo. Analysis of covariance for ReHo was determined between the PD-MCI, PD-CN, and NC groups. Spearman rank correlations were assessed using the ReHo maps and data from the neuropsychological tests. Results In comparison with NC, PD-CN patients showed significantly higher ReHo values in the right middle frontal gyrus (MFG) and lower ReHo values in the left supramarginal gyrus, bilateral inferior parietal lobule (IPL), and the right postcentral gyrus (PCG). In comparison with PD-CN patients, PD-MCI patients displayed significantly higher ReHo values in the right PCG, left middle occipital gyrus (MOG) and IPL. No significant correlation between ReHo indices and the neuropsychological scales was observed. Conclusion Our finding revealed that decreases in ReHo in the default mode network (DMN) may appear before PD-related cognitive impairment. In order to preserve executive attention capacity, ReHo in the right MFG in PD patients lacking cognition impairment increased for compensation. PD-MCI showed increased ReHo in the left MOG, which might have been caused by visual and visual-spatial dysfunction, and increased ReHo in the left IPL, which might reflect network disturbance and induce cognition deficits.

Intrinsic Brain Activity Alterations in Patients With Mild Cognitive Impairment-to-Normal Reversion: A Resting-State Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study From Voxel to Whole-Brain Level

“…These results indicate that ALFF and fALFF may help to detect the underlying pathological mechanism in the AD continuum. Additionally, previous studies have detected several brain regions with higher ALFF in patients with MCI related to those exhibiting functional disruptions in AD, which may indicate a possible compensatory mechanism in the early stage of AD ( Wang et al, 2015 ; Xing et al, 2021 ). These findings contribute to partly elucidating the functional abnormalities in patients with MCI.…”

Regional activity alterations in Parkinson’s disease patients with anxiety disorders: A resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging study

“…Zhang et al 10.3389/fnagi.2022.1055160 Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience 08 frontiersin.org inferior parietal lobes. The precuneus is associated with selfconcentration of attention, self-emotional regulation, and situational memory extraction (Wee et al, 2016), while the inferior parietal lobule is related to the control of visual attention and working memory (Wolters et al, 2019;Xing et al, 2021). A previous study found that increased anxiety was associated with a stronger FC between the amygdala and the precuneus and parietal cortex in PD-A patients (Zhang et al, 2019).…”

“…It measures local functional synchronization of spontaneous neuronal activity between one voxel and its nearest neighbors and has been employed to assess local brain activities in various neuronal disorders (Fang et al, 2021;Du et al, 2022). In recent years, ReHo analysis has also been applied to detect the neural mechanism of non-motor symptoms of PD patients, including sleep disorders (Wen et al, 2016;Chen et al, 2019), hyposmia (Su et al, 2015) and cognitive impairment (Harrington et al, 2017;Xing et al, 2021). To date, only Wang et al have proposed that PD-A patients have abnormal ReHo values in the left cerebellum and left medial frontal gyrus when compared to PD-NA patients and healthy controls +(HCs) (Wang et al, 2021).…”

Brain disease research based on functional magnetic resonance imaging data and machine learning: a review

“…ReHo is a major tool for detecting local neural synchronization (Xing et al, 2021 ). It reflects the consistency of regional brain activity by computing Kendall's coefficient of concordance between a specific voxel and its neighboring voxels (Zang et al, 2004 ; Pang et al, 2021 ).…”