Abstract
The basal nucleus of Meynert (BNM) shows structural abnormalities in Parkinson’s disease with mild cognitive impairment (PD-MCI). However, it is yet unknown whether functional connectivity (FC) in the BNM (BNM-FC) is altered in patients with PD-MCI. Therefore, in this study, we compared the BNM-FC of patients with PD-MCI and PD patients with normal cognition (PD-NC), to evaluate the relationship between the observed differences of BNM-FC and neuropsychological test scores. Three patient groups, namely PD-MCI, PD-NC, and healthy controls (HCs) (n = 22 each) including were recruited for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning and neuropsychological assessment. Analysis of covariance was used to assess the inter-group differences. The relationships between BNM-FC and results of cognitive tests were evaluated by partial correlation analysis. Multivariate pattern analysis was used to test whether PD-MCI can be distinguished from PD-NC based on the BNM-FC. Classifier performance was assessed through permutation testing. Compared to PD-NC and HCs, PD-MCI showed reduced BNM-FC in the right superior parietal lobe (SPL) and the right postcentral gyrus. Furthermore, a positive correlation was observed between BNM-FC and the clock copying test (CLOX)/auditory verbal learning test (AVLT) immediate recall scores. We found that 86.36% subjects were correctly classified based on the BNM-FC using the leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) method, with a sensitivity of 90.91% and specificity of 81.82%. Our study provides new insights into the neural basis of cognitive dysfunction in PD patients. We also found that BNM-FC can be an effective feature to distinguish PD-MCI from PD-NC.
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