Department of Developmental Neuroscience, IRCCS Fondazione Stella Maris, Calambrone, Pisa, Italy.
Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy.
Neural Plast. 2018 Jul 25;2018:6950547. doi: 10.1155/2018/6950547. eCollection 2018.
Little is known about the action observation network (AON) in children with unilateral cerebral palsy (UCP). Using fMRI, we aimed to explore AON and sensory-motor network (SMN) in UCP children and compare them to typically developed (TD) children and analyse the relationship between AON (re-)organization and several neurophysiological and clinical measures. Twelve UCP children were assessed with clinical scales and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). For the fMRI study, they underwent a paradigm based on observation of complex and simple object-manipulation tasks executed by dominant and nondominant hand. Moreover, UCP and TD children carried out a further fMRI session to explore SMN in both an active motor and passive sensory task. AON in the UCP group showed higher lateralization, negatively related to performances on clinical scales, and had greater activation of unaffected hemisphere as compared to the bilateral representation in the TD group. In addition, a good congruence was found between bilateral or contralateral activation of AON and activation of SMN and TMS data. These findings indicate that our paradigm might be useful in exploring AON and the response to therapy in UCP subjects.
关于单侧脑瘫（UCP）儿童的动作观察网络（AON）知之甚少。我们使用 fMRI 技术旨在探索 UCP 儿童的 AON 和感觉运动网络（SMN），并将其与正常发育（TD）儿童进行比较，并分析 AON（重新）组织与几种神经生理和临床测量之间的关系。对 12 名 UCP 儿童进行临床评估和经颅磁刺激（TMS）检查。对于 fMRI 研究，他们接受了基于观察由优势手和非优势手执行的复杂和简单物体操作任务的范式。此外，UCP 和 TD 儿童进行了另一项 fMRI 会议，以探索主动运动和被动感觉任务中的 SMN。UCP 组的 AON 表现出更高的侧化，与临床评分呈负相关，并且与 TD 组的双侧表现相比，未受影响的半球的激活更大。此外，在 AON 的双侧或对侧激活与 SMN 和 TMS 数据的激活之间发现了很好的一致性。这些发现表明，我们的范式可能有助于探索 UCP 受试者的 AON 和对治疗的反应。
