Abstract
Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a common non-motor symptom of early Parkinson’s disease (PD), but the neural mechanisms underlying it remain poorly understood. The aim of the present study was to investigate the characteristics of cognition-related brain activities in the PD patients with MCI. The brain fMRIs and cognition tests were acquired in 39 PD patients and 22 healthy controls (HC) from September 2013 to January 2015. The patients were divided into two groups: PD-MCI (n = 18) and PD with normal cognition (PDNC, n = 19). we used resting state fMRI and a regional homogeneity (ReHo) method to explore patterns of intrinsic brain activity in patients with PD-MCI as compared with PDNC subjects and HC. Compared with the PDNC group, the PD-MCI group exhibited significantly increased ReHo in parts of the prefrontal cortex regions (e.g. right superior frontal gyrus, right middle frontal gyrus and orbitofrontal cortex). Compared to the HC group, a decrease of ReHo value in left thalamus was found in PD-MCI. However, this reduction was not found in the left thalamus of PDNC group, but in the above prefrontal regions (p < 0.05, with Bonferroni correction). These results demonstrate that the ReHo of prefrontal cortex in resting state is changed in PD patients with MCI. The presence of MCI in PD may be attributed to abnormal regional activity in prefrontal cortex regions.
Highlights
Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a common non-motor symptom of early Parkinson’s disease (PD), but the neural mechanisms underlying it remain poorly understood
Among PD patients, eighteen of the patients fulfilled the new criteria for PD with mild cognitive impairment (PD-MCI), and the rest of them were classified as PD with normal cognition (PDNC) [24]
By identify the differences of regional homogeneity (ReHo) values with a two-sample two-tailed t-test to each pair of groups, We found ReHo values were increased in the right superior frontal gyrus, right middle frontal gyrus and orbitofrontal cortex with no region decreased in the PD-MCI group comparing to Gendera
Summary
Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a common non-motor symptom of early Parkinson’s disease (PD), but the neural mechanisms underlying it remain poorly understood. Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a common nonmotor feature of Parkinson’s disease (PD). It affects multiple cognitive domains, such as executive function, memory, attention and visuospatial abilities [1, 2], and is associated with increasing age, duration of disease and disease severity [3]. Early identification of PD-MCI by its Resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) is a cognitively unbiased imaging technique with high spatial and temporal resolution [8], and is widely thought to reflect spontaneous neural activity of the human brain relative to task-based [9], especially in the low-frequency band. There has been increasing interest in the use of rs-fMRI in PD and PD-related comorbidities [10,11,12,13]
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