Abstract

Introduction: Brain regions are anatomically and functionally interconnected in order to facilitate important functions like cognition and movement. It remains incompletely understood how brain connectivity contributes to the pathophysiology of Tourette’s disorder (TD). By using resting-state functional MRI, we aimed to identify alterations in the default mode network (DMN), frontal-parietal network (FPN), sensori-motor network (SMN), and salience network (SN) in TD compared with healthy control (HC) subjects.Method: In 23 adult TD patients and 22 HC, 3T-MRI resting-state scans were obtained. Independent component analysis was performed comparing TD and HC to investigate connectivity patterns within and between resting-state networks.Results: TD patients showed higher involvement of the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex in the connectivity of the DMN and less involvement of the inferior parietal cortex in the connectivity of the FPN when compared to HC. Moreover, TD patients showed a stronger coupling between DMN and left FPN than HC. Finally, in TD patients, functional connectivity within DMN correlated negatively with tic severity.Conclusion: We tentatively interpret the increased functional connectivity within DMN in TD patients as compensatory to the lower functional connectivity within left FPN. The stronger coupling between DMN and left FPN, together with the finding that higher DMN intrinsic connectivity is associated with lower tic severity would indicate that DMN is recruited to exert motor inhibition.

Highlights

  • Brain regions are anatomically and functionally interconnected in order to facilitate important functions like cognition and movement

  • There was no difference of frame-wise displacement (FD) between Tourette’s disorder (TD) and healthy control (HC)

  • The dual regression approach allows identifying which areas within a given network differ between TD patients and HC in terms of the strength of their contribution to the independent component, reflecting their level of connectivity to the rest of that network

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Summary

Introduction

Brain regions are anatomically and functionally interconnected in order to facilitate important functions like cognition and movement. It remains incompletely understood how brain connectivity contributes to the pathophysiology of Tourette’s disorder (TD). Functional Connectivity in Tourette (Alexander et al, 1986) In recent years, this model has been extended to include interactions at the cortical level, involving the fronto-parietal network (FPN), based on emerging functional and structural neuroimaging evidence for its relevance to the pathophysiology of TD (Ganos et al, 2013; Worbe et al, 2015).

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