Abstract

Abstract Heart failure (HF) patients show brain damage in regions controlling mood, autonomic, and cognitive functions. HF patient's exhibit symptoms related to depression, anxiety, poor sleep quality, daytime sleepiness, impaired cognition, and poor self-care, however, the relationship between brain damage and disease related symptoms is unclear. Therefore, our aim was to correlate gray matter density in prefrontal cortices, hippocampus, and insular lobe with disease symptoms using T1-weight voxel based morphometry procedure and evaluate the measure that predicts the brain damage. Methods Two high-resolution T1-weighted data were collected from each 42 HF subjects (age, 55.65±7.61; 30 male; LVEF 27.74±9.40%; NYHA class II/III) using a 3.0-Tesla MRI scanner. Depression, anxiety, sleep quality, daytime sleepiness, cognition, and self-care issues were examined with Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS), Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), and Self-Care of Heart Failure Inventory (SCHFI) respectively. Both T1-weighted scans were realigned, averaged, and segmented into gray matter (GM), white matter, and cerebrospinal fluid tissue type. GM maps were normalized (unmodulated) to a common space and smoothed to obtain GM density maps. The smoothed GM density maps were used to examine the association of brain damage with disease symptoms (SPM 12; partial correlation; covariates, age and gender; p<0.005). Region of interest analyses were performed in prefrontal cortices, insular lobe and hippocampus to evaluate the correlation using partial correlation (SPSS, covariates, age and gender, p<0.05). Results The average scores for BAI 9.55±9.90, BDI 8.69±7.05, ESS 7.00±3.72, MoCA 24.64±3.48, PSQI 6.62±3.90, maintenance 73.12±13.78, management 70.28±13.98, and confidence 73.77±15.96 were calculated. Significant negative correlations was observed between GM density values and BAI (prefrontal cortices, r=−0.532, p<0.001), BDI (prefrontal cortices, r=−0.60, p<0.001; insula, r=−0.528, p<0.001, hippocampus, r=−0.432, p<0.005), ESS (prefrontal cortices, r=−0.419, p=0.007; insula, r=−0.443, p=0.004), and PSQI (prefrontal cortices, r=−0.517, p=0.001) scores, and positive correlation between GM density values, MoCA (prefrontal cortices, r=0.462, p=0.003) and SCHFI scores (maintenance: prefrontal cortices, r=0.422, p=0.007; insula, r=0.412, p=0.009, hippocampus, r=0.455, p=0.004; management: prefrontal cortices, r=0.728, p=0.001; insula, r=0.707, p=0.001, hippocampus, r=0.775, p<0.001) (Figure 1). Figure 1 Conclusions HF subjects show more wide-spread and significant correlations between regional GM density values and BDI as well as SCHFI management scores compared to the other disease symptom measures. The findings suggest that damage in mood, autonomic, and cognitive functions sites better correlate with BDI and SCHFI over other measures. Acknowledgement/Funding NIH/NINR 1R01 NR014669

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