Aganj Iman, Mora Jocelyn, Frau-Pascual Aina, Fischl Bruce
Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Radiology Department, Massachusetts General Hospital, 149 13 St., Suite 2301, Boston, MA 02129, USA.
Radiology Department, Harvard Medical School, 25 Shattuck St., Boston, MA 02115, USA.
bioRxiv. 2023 Nov 9:2023.06.30.547308. doi: 10.1101/2023.06.30.547308.
Discovery of the associations between brain structural connectivity and clinical and demographic variables can help to better understand the vulnerability and resilience of the brain architecture to neurodegenerative diseases and to discover biomarkers.
We used four diffusion-MRI databases, three related to Alzheimer's disease, to exploratorily correlate structural connections between 85 brain regions with non-MRI variables, while stringently correcting the significance values for multiple testing and ruling out spurious correlations via careful visual inspection. We repeated the analysis with brain connectivity augmented with multi-synaptic neural pathways.
We found 85 and 101 significant relationships with direct and augmented connectivity, respectively, which were generally stronger for the latter. Age was consistently linked to decreased connectivity, and healthier clinical scores were generally linked to increased connectivity.
Our findings help to elucidate which structural brain networks are affected in Alzheimer's disease and aging and highlight the importance of including indirect connections.
发现脑结构连通性与临床及人口统计学变量之间的关联，有助于更好地理解脑结构对神经退行性疾病的易损性和恢复力，并发现生物标志物。
我们使用了四个扩散磁共振成像（diffusion-MRI）数据库，其中三个与阿尔茨海默病相关，以探索性地将85个脑区之间的结构连接与非MRI变量进行关联，同时严格校正多重检验的显著性值，并通过仔细的视觉检查排除虚假相关性。我们对通过多突触神经通路增强的脑连通性重复了该分析。
我们分别发现了85个和101个与直接连通性和增强连通性的显著关系，后者的关系通常更强。年龄始终与连通性降低相关，而更健康的临床评分通常与连通性增加相关。
我们的研究结果有助于阐明在阿尔茨海默病和衰老过程中哪些脑结构网络受到影响，并强调纳入间接连接的重要性。
