Park Jin-Hyuck
Department of Occupational Therapy, College of Medical Science, Soonchunhyang University, Asan, Republic of Korea.
Front Aging Neurosci. 2023 Apr 11;15:1137283. doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2023.1137283. eCollection 2023.
Early detection of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a pre-clinical stage of Alzheimer's disease (AD), has been highlighted as it could be beneficial to prevent progression to AD. Although prior studies on MCI screening have been conducted, the optimized detection way remain unclear yet. Recently, the potential of biomarker for MCI has gained a lot of attention due to a relatively low discriminant power of clinical screening tools.
This study evaluated biomarkers for screening MCI by performing a verbal digit span task (VDST) using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure signals from the prefrontal cortex (PFC) from a group of 84 healthy controls and 52 subjects with MCI. The concentration changes of oxy-hemoglobin (HbO) were explored during the task in subject groups.
Findings revealed that significant reductions in HbO concentration were observed in the PFC in the MCI group. Specially, the mean of HbO (mHbO) in the left PFC showed the highest discriminant power for MCI, which was higher than that of the Korean version of montreal cognitive assessment (MoCA-K) widely used as a screening tool for MCI. Furthermore, the mHbO in the PFC during the VDST was identified to be significantly correlated to the MoCA-K scores.
These findings shed new light on the feasibility and superiority of fNIRS-derived neural biomarker for screening MCI.
轻度认知障碍（MCI）作为阿尔茨海默病（AD）的临床前期阶段，其早期检测受到了关注，因为这可能有助于预防向AD的进展。尽管之前已经进行了关于MCI筛查的研究，但优化的检测方法仍不明确。最近，由于临床筛查工具的鉴别力相对较低，MCI生物标志物的潜力受到了广泛关注。
本研究通过使用功能近红外光谱（fNIRS）进行言语数字广度任务（VDST）来评估用于筛查MCI的生物标志物，以测量来自84名健康对照者和52名MCI患者的前额叶皮质（PFC）的信号。在任务过程中探索了受试者组中氧合血红蛋白（HbO）的浓度变化。
研究结果显示，MCI组的PFC中HbO浓度显著降低。特别地，左侧PFC中的HbO均值（mHbO）对MCI显示出最高的鉴别力，高于广泛用作MCI筛查工具的韩国版蒙特利尔认知评估（MoCA-K）。此外，VDST期间PFC中的mHbO被确定与MoCA-K评分显著相关。
这些发现为基于fNIRS的神经生物标志物筛查MCI的可行性和优越性提供了新的线索。
