Abstract
Contralateral regions play critical role in functional compensation in glioma patients. Voxel-mirrored homotopic connectivity (VMHC) characterizes the intrinsic functional connectivity (FC) of the brain, considered to have a regional functional basis. We aimed to investigate the alterations of brain regional function and VMHC in patients with frontal glioma, and further investigated the correlation between these alterations and cognition. We enrolled patients with frontal glioma and matched healthy controls (HC). We chose degree centrality (DC), regional homogeneity (ReHo), and VMHC to investigate the alterations of regional function and intrinsic FC in patients. Furthermore, partial correlation analyses were conducted to explore the relationship between imaging functional indicators and cognitions. Compared with HC, patients showed decreased static VMHC within right and left middle frontal gyrus (MFG.R, MFG.L), left superior frontal gyrus (SFG.L), right precuneus (PCUN.R), and left precuneus (PCUN.L), decreased static DC within left cingulate gyrus (CG.L), right superior frontal gyrus (SFG.R), and right postcentral gyrus (POCG.R), decreased static ReHo within CG.L, decreased dynamic ReHo within right inferior parietal lobule (IPL.R), but increased dynamic VMHC (dVMHC) within PCUN.R and PCUN.L. Furthermore, values of decreased VMHC within MFG.R, decreased DC within CG.L, decreased ReHo within CG.L, and increased dVMHC within PCUN.R were significantly positively correlated with cognitive functions. We preliminarily confirmed glioma causes regional dysfunction and disturbs long-distance FC, and long-distance FC showed strong instability in patients with frontal glioma. Meanwhile, the correlation analyses indicated directions for cognitive protection in patients with frontal glioma.
Highlights
Glioma, which is the most common primary malignant brain tumor in adults, can occur anywhere in the central nervous system (CNS), but mainly in the brain and glial tissue(Ostrom et al, 2014)
When we compared the Voxel-mirrored homotopic connectivity (VMHC) between patients and healthy controls (HC), we found there were several reduced clusters in the right middle frontal gyrus (MFG.R), left middle frontal gyrus (MFG.L), right precuneus (PCUN.R), left precuneus (PCUN.L) (Table 3 and Fig. 1)
The increased dynamic VMHC (dVMHC) revealed an upward tendency in the fluctuation of long-distance homotopic connectivity,but the reduced dynamic ReHo (dReHo) indicated a reduced fluctuation of regional function in patients with frontal glioma, which indicated that long-distance functional connectivity showed stronger instability in patients with frontal glioma
Summary
Glioma, which is the most common primary malignant brain tumor in adults, can occur anywhere in the central nervous system (CNS), but mainly in the brain and glial tissue(Ostrom et al, 2014). These effects of glioma are not localized frequently and may cause alterations structurally and functionally in distant brain regions in patients with glioma It has been found in some studies that patients with unilateral temporal glioma existed homotopic compensatory increase in gray matter (GM) volume and amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (ALFF) in the contralateral temporal lobe(Hu et al, 2020; D. 2021; Fabien Almairac, Duffau, & Herbet, 2018), which reminded us that the undamaged contralateral brain region played a crucial role in functional compensation in patients with glioma It may help us better understand the potential compensatory patterns and protect cognitive function in patients with glioma by exploring homotopic alterations in brain
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