Poster No:
2533
Submission Type:
Abstract Submission
Authors:
Cheng-Wei Huang1, Chin-Hsien Lin2, Ming-Tsung Tseng3
Institutions:
1Graduate Institute of Brain and Mind Sciences, Taipei, Taiwan, 2Department of Neurology, National Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan, 3Graduate Institute of Brain and Mind Sciences, Taipei, TAIWAN
First Author:
Cheng-Wei Huang
Graduate Institute of Brain and Mind Sciences
Taipei, Taiwan
Co-Author(s):
Chin-Hsien Lin
Department of Neurology, National Taiwan University Hospital
Taipei, Taiwan
Introduction:
Accumulating evidence indicates that neurodegenerative diseases spread through the brain connectome. For Parkinson's disease (PD), non-motor manifestations may accompany motor dysfunction at an early disease stage when dopaminergic degeneration is limited to the basal ganglia. It remains unclear whether, based on the network-spread account, these abnormalities emanated from functional dysconnectivity with the basal ganglia, and whether interventions normalizing this connectivity could reverse these abnormalities.
Methods:
To address this issue, we focused on somatosensory perception and employed functional MRI to record brain responses to tactile tasks in patients with mild-to-moderate PD and healthy controls before and after rhythmic auditory stimulation-assisted gait (RASg) training.
Results:
Consistent with the presence of striatal degeneration, PD patients showed right posterior putamen (pPut) hypoactivation during both motor execution and detection of tactile stimuli. During tactile detection, they also exhibited reduced functional connectivity from the right pPut to IPL, whose activity reflected patients' impaired tactile detectability. Importantly, this hypoconnectivity predicted right IPL hypoactivation, indicating that pPut-IPL dysconnectivity underlay patients' somatosensory abnormalities. In addition, RASg training normalized patients' motor function and tactile detectability, which was accompanied by normalization of right IPL activation and pPut-IPL connectivity during tactile detection. Notably, training-induced changes in pPut-IPL connectivity predicted changes in IPL activation, indicating that normalizing pPut-IPL hypoconnectivity recovered patients' somatosensory abnormalities.
Conclusions:
These findings suggest that somatosensory abnormalities in PD arise from the spread of striatal pathology to relevant cortical regions through striatal dysconnectivity. RASg training acts to reverse this dysconnectivity and thus improves somatosensory abnormalities in PD patients.
Modeling and Analysis Methods:
fMRI Connectivity and Network Modeling
Motor Behavior:
Motor Behavior Other
Novel Imaging Acquisition Methods:
BOLD fMRI 2
Perception, Attention and Motor Behavior:
Perception: Tactile/Somatosensory 1
Keywords:
Basal Ganglia
DISORDERS
FUNCTIONAL MRI
Physical Therapy
Touch
1|2Indicates the priority used for review
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