Abstract
Memory impairment is a typical characteristic of patients with subcortical vascular mild cognitive impairment (svMCI) or with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI). The hippocampus, which plays an important role in the consolidation of information from short-term memory to long-term memory, is a heterogeneous structure that consists of several anatomically and functionally distinct subfields. However, whether distinct hippocampal subfields are differentially and selectively affected by svMCI pathology and whether these abnormal changes in hippocampal subfields are different between svMCI and aMCI patients are largely unknown. A total of 26 svMCI patients, 26 aMCI patients and 26 healthy controls matched according to age, gender and years of education were enrolled in this study. We utilized an automated hippocampal subfield segmentation method provided by FreeSurfer to estimate the volume of several hippocampal subfields, including the cornu ammonis (CA) areas, the dentate gyrus (DG), the subiculum and the presubiculum. Compared with controls, the left subiculum and presubiculum and the right CA4/DG displayed significant atrophy in patients with svMCI. Interestingly, we also found significant differences in the volume of the right CA1 between the svMCI and aMCI groups. Taken together, our results reveal region-specific vulnerability of hippocampal subfields to svMCI pathology and identify distinct hippocampal subfield atrophy patterns between svMCI and aMCI patients.
Highlights
These deformations extended to the lateral head (CA1) and the inferior body in Subcortical Vascular dementia (VaD) (SVaD) patients[10,11]
The number of vascular risk factors was significantly fewer (p < 0.005 based on Bonferroni post hoc analysis) in both the NC and amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) groups compared to the subcortical vascular mild cognitive impairment (svMCI) group
We found that hippocampal subfields were differentially and selectively affected by svMCI pathology
Summary
These deformations extended to the lateral head (CA1) and the inferior body (subiculum) in SVaD patients[10,11]. Whether the volumes of various hippocampal subfields in svMCI patients display distinct changes (i.e., heterogeneity) relative to their respective volumes in normal controls is largely unknown. The purposes of the present study were to 1) investigate whether hippocampal subfields in svMCI patients display different patterns of atrophy from those in normally aging subjects and 2) compare the patterns of hippocampal atrophy between svMCI and aMCI patients. We first performed segmentation of the hippocampal subfields using a fully automated method provided by FreeSurfer[21]; we statistically compared the subfield volumes between the groups. The hippocampal subfields have distinct histological characteristics and appear to be differentially affected by various neurodegenerative diseases[17]; we expected to observe different patterns of atrophy in the hippocampal subfields of svMCI patients compared with normal control (NC) subjects and with aMCI patients
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