Hippocampal connectivity in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS): more than Papez circuit impairment
- PDF / 6,178,278 Bytes
- 13 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 58 Downloads / 202 Views
ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Hippocampal connectivity in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS): more than Papez circuit impairment Francesca Trojsi 1 & Federica Di Nardo 1 & Giuseppina Caiazzo 1 & Mattia Siciliano 1,2 & Giulia D’Alvano 1 & Teresa Ferrantino 1 & Carla Passaniti 1 & Dario Ricciardi 1 & Sabrina Esposito 1 & Luigi Lavorgna 1 & Antonio Russo 1 & Simona Bonavita 1 & Mario Cirillo 1 & Gabriella Santangelo 2 & Fabrizio Esposito 3 & Gioacchino Tedeschi 1 Received: 2 April 2020 / Revised: 18 August 2020 / Accepted: 5 October 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Emerging evidence suggests that memory deficit in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a neurodegenerative disease with varying impairment of motor abilities and cognitive profile, may be independent from executive dysfunction. Our multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) approach, including resting state functional MRI (RS-fMRI), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and voxel-based morphometry (VBM), aimed to investigate structural and functional changes within and beyond the Papez circuit in non-demented ALS patients (n = 32) compared with healthy controls (HCs, n = 21), and whether these changes correlated with neuropsychological measures of verbal and non-verbal memory. We revealed a decreased functional connectivity between bilateral hippocampus, bilateral parahippocampal gyri and cerebellum in ALS patients compared with HCs. Between-group comparisons revealed white matter abnormalities in the genu and body of the corpus callosum and bilateral cortico-spinal tracts, superior longitudinal and uncinate fasciculi in ALS patients (p < .05, family-wise error corrected). Interestingly, changes of Digit Span forward performance were inversely related to RS-fMRI signal fluctuations in the cerebellum, while changes of both episodic and visual memory scores were inversely related to mean and radial diffusivity abnormalities in several WM fiber tracts, including middle cerebellar peduncles. Our findings revealed that ALS patients showed significant functional and structural connectivity changes across the regions comprising the Papez circuit, as well as more extended areas including cerebellum and frontal, temporal and parietal areas, supporting the theory of a multi-system pathology in ALS that spreads from cortical to subcortical structures. Keywords Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis . Resting state functional MRI . Diffusion tensor imaging . Memory dysfunction . Papez circuit
1. Introduction Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-020-00408-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Francesca Trojsi [email protected] 1
Department of Advanced Medical and Surgical Sciences, MRI Research Center SUN-FISM, Università degli Studi della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Naples, Italy
2
Department of Psychology, Università degli Studi della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Caserta, Italy
3
Department of Medicine, Surgery and Dentistry, Scuola Medica Salernitana, University of
Data Loading...
