Chen Jianhuai, Chen Yun, Gao Qingqiang, Chen Guotao, Dai Yutian, Yao Zhijian, Lu Qing
a Department of Andrology , Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital, The Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing University Medical School , Nanjing , China.
b Department of Psychiatry , Nanjing Brain Hospital, The Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University , Nanjing , China.
Int J Neurosci. 2018 May;128(5):393-403. doi: 10.1080/00207454.2017.1387116. Epub 2017 Nov 3.
Despite increasing understanding of the cerebral functional changes and structural abnormalities in erectile dysfunction, alterations in the topological organization of brain networks underlying psychogenic erectile dysfunction remain unclear.
Here, based on the diffusion tensor image data of 25 patients and 26 healthy controls, we investigated the topological organization of brain structural networks and its correlations with the clinical variables using the graph theoretical analysis.
Patients displayed a preserved overall small-world organization and exhibited a less connectivity strength in the left inferior frontal gyrus, amygdale and the right inferior temporal gyrus. Moreover, an abnormal hub pattern was observed in patients, which might disturb the information interactions of the remaining brain network. Additionally, the clustering coefficient of the left hippocampus was positively correlated with the duration of patients and the normalized betweenness centrality of the right anterior cingulate gyrus and the left calcarine fissure were negatively correlated with the sum scores of the 17-item Hamilton Depression Rating Scale.
These findings suggested that the damaged white matter and the abnormal hub distribution of the left prefrontal and limbic cortex might contribute to the pathogenesis of psychogenic erectile dysfunction and provided new insights into the understanding of the pathophysiological mechanisms of psychogenic erectile dysfunction.
尽管对勃起功能障碍中脑功能变化和结构异常的认识不断增加，但心理性勃起功能障碍背后脑网络拓扑组织的改变仍不清楚。
在此，基于25例患者和26名健康对照者的扩散张量图像数据，我们使用图论分析研究了脑结构网络的拓扑组织及其与临床变量的相关性。
患者表现出整体保留的小世界组织，且在左侧额下回、杏仁核和右侧颞下回的连接强度较低。此外，在患者中观察到异常的枢纽模式，这可能会干扰其余脑网络的信息交互。此外，左侧海马体的聚类系数与患者病程呈正相关，右侧前扣带回和左侧距状裂的标准化中介中心性与17项汉密尔顿抑郁量表总分呈负相关。
这些发现表明，左侧前额叶和边缘皮质的白质损伤及异常的枢纽分布可能有助于心理性勃起功能障碍的发病机制，并为理解心理性勃起功能障碍的病理生理机制提供了新的见解。
