From Cognition and Brain Plasticity Unit, Diffusion MRI and brain connectivity
will present the talk titled
Differences in functional connectivity as a predictor of clinical profiles in Huntington’s disease
Abstract
Huntington’s disease (HD) is a neurodegenerative disease that is characterized by motor, cognitive and motivational disturbances. However, there is a high degree of variability in the prominence and evolution of symptoms across patients. Recent research has attempted to uncover the underlying neural mechanisms of such variability. These studies demonstrated the presence of distinct symptomatic profiles that also differed in their underlying neurobiological substrates. To date, however, very few studies investigated the functional integrity of cortico-striatal circuits affected in HD, and even less is known about whether functional alterations could explain interindividual differences observed in each symptom domain. Using resting-state fMRI, we investigated changes in functional connectivity in HD patients, and whether different functional connectivity patterns would predict different profiles. Given that HD is characterized by striatal atrophy, we implemented a seed-based approach, where we investigated the three main cortico-striatal circuits (i.e. motor, associative and motivational) with the caudate, putamen and accumbens being the seed regions. In addition, we made use of principal component analysis to explore different symptom profiles. Finally, the relation between functional connectivity patterns and behavioral measures was analyzed using multiple linear regression. We found two distinct symptomatic profiles, one characterized by motor and cognitive symptoms (i.e. motor-cognitive profile), and the other with motivational symptoms (i.e. motivational profile). The two profiles were defined by distinct functional connectivity patterns, however we also observed a high degree of overlap between the striatal circuits, which predicted both symptomatic profiles. Importantly, we identified possible compensatory mechanisms especially in the right hemisphere, suggesting a higher vulnerability of the left hemisphere in HD in terms of functional alterations. Our results have important implications especially in the clinical context as they could be informative in defining specific neural signatures even before the clinical signs appear.
Location: Online (ZOOM)
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