Department of Biomedical Imaging and Radiological Sciences, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei 11221, Taiwan.
J Neurosci. 2010 Dec 15;30(50):16876-85. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4136-10.2010.
Recent research on Alzheimer's disease (AD) has shown that the decline of cognitive and memory functions is accompanied by a disrupted neuronal connectivity characterized by white matter (WM) degeneration. However, changes in the topological organization of WM structural network in AD remain largely unknown. Here, we used diffusion tensor image tractography to construct the human brain WM networks of 25 AD patients and 30 age- and sex-matched healthy controls, followed by a graph theoretical analysis. We found that both AD patients and controls had a small-world topology in WM network, suggesting an optimal balance between structurally segregated and integrative organization. More important, the AD patients exhibited increased shortest path length and decreased global efficiency in WM network compared with controls, implying abnormal topological organization. Furthermore, we showed that the WM network contained highly connected hub regions that were predominately located in the precuneus, cingulate cortex, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which was consistent with the previous diffusion-MRI studies. Specifically, AD patients were found to have reduced nodal efficiency predominantly located in the frontal regions. Finally, we showed that the alterations of various network properties were significantly correlated with the behavior performances. Together, the present study demonstrated for the first time that the Alzheimer's brain was associated with disrupted topological organization in the large-scale WM structural networks, thus providing the structural evidence for abnormalities of systematic integrity in this disease. This work could also have implications for understanding how the abnormalities of structural connectivity in AD underlie behavioral deficits in the patients.
最近关于阿尔茨海默病(AD)的研究表明,认知和记忆功能的下降伴随着神经元连接的中断,其特征是白质(WM)退化。然而,AD 患者 WM 结构网络拓扑组织的变化在很大程度上仍然未知。在这里,我们使用弥散张量图像纤维束追踪构建了 25 名 AD 患者和 30 名年龄和性别匹配的健康对照者的人脑 WM 网络,然后进行了图论分析。我们发现 AD 患者和对照组的 WM 网络都具有小世界拓扑结构,表明结构分离和整合组织之间存在最佳平衡。更重要的是,与对照组相比,AD 患者的 WM 网络中最短路径长度增加,全局效率降低,表明拓扑组织异常。此外,我们表明 WM 网络包含高度连接的枢纽区域,主要位于后扣带回、扣带回和背外侧前额叶皮层,这与以前的弥散 MRI 研究一致。具体来说,AD 患者的额区节点效率降低。最后,我们发现,各种网络特性的改变与行为表现显著相关。总之,本研究首次表明,阿尔茨海默氏脑与大尺度 WM 结构网络中拓扑组织的中断有关,从而为该疾病系统完整性异常提供了结构证据。这项工作还有助于理解 AD 中结构连接的异常如何导致患者的行为缺陷。