White Matter Atrophy in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus Patients With Mild Cognitive Impairment

Chang Li; Rongbing Jin; Kaijun Liu; Yang Li; Zhiwei Zuo; Haipeng Tong; Jingna Zhang; Junfeng Zhang; Yu Guo; Yuqi Lai; Jinju Sun; Jian Wang; Kunlin Xiong; Xiao Chen

doi:10.3389/fnins.2020.602501

White Matter Atrophy in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus Patients With Mild Cognitive Impairment

Front Neurosci. 2021 Jan 18:14:602501. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2020.602501. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Chang Li^{1

2}, Rongbing Jin^{3

4}, Kaijun Liu⁵, Yang Li¹, Zhiwei Zuo⁶, Haipeng Tong^{1

4}, Jingna Zhang⁷, Junfeng Zhang^{1

4}, Yu Guo¹, Yuqi Lai⁸, Jinju Sun³, Jian Wang², Kunlin Xiong^{1

4}, Xiao Chen^{3

4}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Radiology, Daping Hospital, Army Medical University, Chongqing, China.
² Department of Radiology, Southwest Hospital, Army Medical University, Chongqing, China.
³ Department of Nuclear Medicine, Daping Hospital, Army Medical University, Chongqing, China.
⁴ Chongqing Clinical Research Center for Imaging and Nuclear Medicine, Chongqing, China.
⁵ Department of Gastroenterology, Daping Hospital, Army Medical University, Chongqing, China.
⁶ Department of Radiology, General Hospital of Western Theater Command, Chengdu, China.
⁷ Department of Medical Imaging, College of Biomedical Engineering, Army Medical University, Chongqing, China.
⁸ School of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Chongqing University, Chongqing, China.

Abstract

Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patients are highly susceptible to developing dementia, especially for those with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), but its underlying cause is still unclear. In this study, we performed a battery of neuropsychological tests and high-resolution sagittal T1-weighted structural imaging to explore how T2DM affects white matter volume (WMV) and cognition in 30 T2DM-MCI patients, 30 T2DM with normal cognition (T2DM-NC) patients, and 30 age-, sex-, and education-matched healthy control (HC) individuals. The WMV of the whole brain was obtained with automated segmentation methods. Correlations between the WMV of each brain region and neuropsychological tests were analyzed in the T2DM patients. The T2DM-NC patients and HC individuals did not reveal any significant differences in WMV. Compared with the T2DM-NC group, the T2DM-MCI group showed statistically significant reduction in the WMV of seven brain regions, mainly located in the frontotemporal lobe and limbic system, five of which significantly correlated with Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) scores. Subsequently, we evaluated the discriminative ability of these five regions for MCI in T2DM patients. The WMV of four regions, including left posterior cingulate, precuneus, insula, and right rostral middle frontal gyrus had high diagnostic value for MCI detection in T2DM patients (AUC > 0.7). Among these four regions, left precuneus WMV presented the best diagnostic value (AUC: 0.736; sensitivity: 70.00%; specificity: 73.33%; Youden index: 0.4333), but with no significant difference relative to the minimum AUC. In conclusion, T2DM could give rise to the white matter atrophy of several brain regions. Each WMV of left posterior cingulate, precuneus, insula, and right rostral middle frontal gyrus could be an independent imaging biomarker to detect cognitive impairment at the early stage in T2DM patients and play an important role in its pathophysiological mechanism.

Keywords: biomarker; magnetic resonance imaging; mild cognitive impairment; type 2 diabetes mellitus; white matter volume.