Abstract
The knee osteoarthritis (KOA) pain is the most common form of arthritis pain affecting millions of people worldwide. Long-term KOA pain causes motor impairment and affects affective and cognitive functions. However, little is known about the structural and functional abnormalities induced by long-term KOA pain. In this work, high-resolution structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) and resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) data were acquired in patients with KOA and age-, sex-matched healthy controls (HC). Gray matter volume (GMV) and fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (fALFF) were used to study the structural and functional abnormalities in patients with KOA. Compared with HC, patients with KOA showed reduced GMV in bilateral insula and bilateral hippocampus, and reduced fALFF in left cerebellum, precentral gyrus, and the right superior occipital gyrus. Patients with KOA also showed increased fALFF in left insula and bilateral hippocampus. In addition, the abnormal GMV in left insula and fALFF in left fusiform were closely correlated with the pain severity or disease duration. These results indicated that long KOA pain leads to brain structural and functional impairments in motor, visual, cognitive, and affective functions that related to brain areas. Our findings may facilitate to understand the neural basis of KOA pain and the future therapy to relieve disease symptoms.
Highlights
Osteoarthritis is a degenerative joint disease with high incidence and mainly occurs in the elderly population
Using positron emission tomography and computed tomography (PET-CT), Yang et al (2012) found that migraine patients exhibited reduced metabolism in the hippocampus following traditional acupuncture therapy suggested that pain-related emotions and memories faded and disappeared as migraine remission occurs. These results collectedly demonstrated that abnormal Gray matter volume (GMV) and fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (fALFF) in hippocampus found in our work may be associated with pain-related emotions and memory deficits (Ezzati et al, 2014)
We found that the fALFF values in the left fusiform of patients with knee osteoarthritis (KOA) were significantly positively related to both KOA pain duration and pain intensity in right knees, which indicates that the fusiform gyrus might be a characteristic brain area allowing for the diagnostic imaging of neural mechanism for KOA pain
Summary
Osteoarthritis is a degenerative joint disease with high incidence and mainly occurs in the elderly population. The knee osteoarthritis (KOA) is one of the most common osteoarthritis which affects millions of people worldwide. Knee pain is a main symptom of KOA which results in decreasing mobility to make the quality of life of the patients worse (Kloppenburg and Berenbaum, 2020). KOA pain is a ubiquitous and chronic pain which leads to restricted movement, sleep disturbance, and psychosocial disability (Ferket et al, 2017; Zhaoyang et al, 2020). KOA pain is worsened with activities, such as walking or climbing steps, and relieved with rest (Losina et al, 2016).
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