Resting-State Functional MRI Metrics in Patients With Chronic Mild Traumatic Brain Injury and Their Association With Clinical Cognitive Performance.

Faezeh Vedaei,Feroze B Mohamed,Andrew B Newberg,Nancy Wintering,Daniel A Monti,George Zabrecky,Mahdi Alizadeh,Jennifer Muller,Anthony J Bazzan,Shiva Shahrampour,Devon Middleton

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2021.768485

Faezeh Vedaei, Feroze B Mohamed + Show 9 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2021.768485

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Abstract

Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) accounts for more than 80% of people experiencing brain injuries. Symptoms of mTBI include short-term and long-term adverse clinical outcomes. In this study, resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) was conducted to measure voxel-based indices including fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (fALFF), regional homogeneity (ReHo), and functional connectivity (FC) in patients suffering from chronic mTBI; 64 patients with chronic mTBI at least 3 months post injury and 40 healthy controls underwent rs-fMRI scanning. Partial correlation analysis controlling for age and gender was performed within mTBI cohort to explore the association between rs-fMRI metrics and neuropsychological scores. Compared with controls, chronic mTBI patients showed increased fALFF in the left middle occipital cortex (MOC), right middle temporal cortex (MTC), and right angular gyrus (AG), and increased ReHo in the left MOC and left posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). Enhanced FC was observed from left MOC to right precuneus; from right MTC to right superior temporal cortex (STC), right supramarginal, and left inferior parietal cortex (IPC); and from the seed located at right AG to left precuneus, left superior medial frontal cortex (SMFC), left MTC, left superior temporal cortex (STC), and left MOC. Furthermore, the correlation analysis revealed a significant correlation between neuropsychological scores and fALFF, ReHo, and seed-based FC measured from the regions with significant group differences. Our results demonstrated that alterations of low-frequency oscillations in chronic mTBI could be representative of disruption in emotional circuits, cognitive performance, and recovery in this cohort.

Highlights

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is one of the most common neurological disorders, accounting for more than 10,000,000 annual deaths and hospitalizations worldwide (Roozenbeek et al, 2013; Sinke et al, 2021)
Based on fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (fALFF) and regional homogeneity (ReHo) results, the regions that showed a significant difference between Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) and CN groups were defined as the seeds
We investigated the association between neuropsychological performance in chronic mTBI patients and altered neural activity at two levels, with fALFF and ReHo at the local level and functional connectivity (FC) at the network level

Summary

Introduction

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is one of the most common neurological disorders, accounting for more than 10,000,000 annual deaths and hospitalizations worldwide (Roozenbeek et al, 2013; Sinke et al, 2021). It has been reported that chronic symptoms from mild TBI (referred to as chronic mTBI it is sometimes called post-concussion syndrome) may develop in some individuals Such patients present with chronic cognitive, neurological, and behavioral symptoms including memory loss, depression, and other deficits in social functioning and reduced quality of life (Hiploylee et al, 2017). The fALFF is the fast Fourier transform (FFT)-based indices of LFO amplitude This is defined as a relative contribution of the power of low-frequency blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal fluctuations and assumed to reflect the magnitude of neural activity (Zuo et al, 2010; Golestani et al, 2017)

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