Abstract
Recent studies have demonstrated structural and functional alterations in Parkinson’s disease (PD) with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). However, the topological patterns of functional brain networks in newly diagnosed PD patients with MCI are unclear so far. In this study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and graph theory approaches to explore the functional brain network in 45 PD patients with MCI (PD-MCI), 22 PD patients without MCI (PD-nMCI), and 18 healthy controls (HC). We found that the PD-MCI, PD-nMCI, and HC groups exhibited a small-world architecture in the functional brain network. However, early-stage PD-MCI patients had decreased clustering coefficient, increased characteristic path length, and changed nodal centrality in the default mode network (DMN), control network (CN), somatomotor network (SMN), and visual network (VN), which might contribute to factors for MCI symptoms in PD patients. Our results demonstrated that PD-MCI patients were associated with disrupted topological organization in the functional network, thus providing a topological network insight into the role of information exchange in the underlying development of MCI symptoms in PD patients.
Highlights
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is one of the most common neurodegenerative diseases with multiple movement disorders and non-motor symptoms
Increased nodal centrality in the visual network (VN), default mode network (DMN), and control network (CN) was observed in the PD-mild cognitive impairment (MCI) group, while there was decreased nodal centrality in the somatomotor network (SMN) (Table 2)
We found that the brain functional network of PD-MCI, PDnMCI, and healthy controls (HC) had a small-world property, which was consistent with many studies by using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data in PD patients (Luo et al, 2015; Sang et al, 2015; Berman et al, 2016; Fang et al, 2017; Hou et al, 2020)
Summary
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is one of the most common neurodegenerative diseases with multiple movement disorders and non-motor symptoms. Among newly diagnosed PD patients, more than 20% will develop mild cognitive impairment (MCI) after 3–5 years. MCI is considered to be a high-risk factor for the further development of dementia, which will seriously affect the quality of patients’ lives (Kehagia et al, 2010). The neural basis underlying the MCI in PD is still not well understood. As one of the most promising neuroimaging methods, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) involving voxel-based morphometry (VBM), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been widely used to explore the structural and functional abnormality of the brain in PD patients with MCI (PD-MCI).
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