Functional Connectivity in Parkinson's Disease Patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment

Qingguang Wang; Wei He; Dinghua Liu; Bojun Han; Qitao Jiang; Jiali Niu; Yunlong Ding

doi:10.2147/IJGM.S300422

Functional Connectivity in Parkinson's Disease Patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment

Int J Gen Med. 2021 Jun 17:14:2623-2630. doi: 10.2147/IJGM.S300422. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Qingguang Wang¹, Wei He², Dinghua Liu¹, Bojun Han¹, Qitao Jiang³, Jiali Niu⁴, Yunlong Ding⁵

Affiliations

¹ Department of Neurology, The Affiliated Jiangyin People's Hospital of Southeast University Medical College, Jiangyin, People's Republic of China.
² Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, The Affiliated Jiangyin People's Hospital of Southeast University Medical College, Jiangyin, People's Republic of China.
³ Department of Medical Imaging, The Affiliated Jiangyin People's Hospital of Southeast University Medical College, Jiangyin, People's Republic of China.
⁴ Department of Clinical Pharmacy, Jingjiang People's Hospital, Jingjiang, People's Republic of China.
⁵ Department of Neurology, Jingjiang People's Hospital, Jingjiang, People's Republic of China.

Abstract

Objective: To explore the alteration of pattens of anatomical and functional connectivity (FC) of posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients with cognitive dysfunction and the relationship between the connection strengths and cognitive state.

Methods: We prospectively enrolled 20 PD patients with mild cognitive impairment (PD-MCI), 13 PD patients with normal cognition (PD-NC) and 13 healthy controls (HCs). By collecting, preprocessing and FC analyzing resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) data, we extracted default mode network (DMN) patterns, compared the differences in DMN between the three groups and the analyzed the correlation between FC value with the commonly used neuropsychological testing.

Results: The PD-MCI showed significant worse performances in general cognition, and PD-NC and HCs showed comparable performances of cognitive function. Cognitive-related differences in DMN were detected in the bilateral precuneus (BPcu). Compared with the HCs, PD-NC and PD-MCI showed significantly decreased FC within BPcu (both P < 0.001). For PD-MCI, the rho of the Fisher's Z-transformed FC (zFC) value within BPcu with the TMTA, DSST and CFT-20min were 0.50, 0.66 and 0.47, respectively. For PD-NC, the rho of the zFC value within BPcu with the MMSE was 0.58.

Discussion: BPcu was the cognitive-related region in DMN. As cognition declines, FC within BPcu weakens. For PD-MCI, the higher the FC values within BPcu were likely to be related to the better the performances of TMTA, DSST and CFT-20 min DR, which needs to be further confirmed by large-sample studies.

Keywords: Parkinson’s disease; functional connectivity; mild cognitive impairment; resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Grants and funding

This work was funded by the Guidance Plan for Social Development of Taizhou Municipal Science and Technology (ssf20160141). The funder had no role in the study design, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, writing of the report, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.