Kicik Ani, Kurt Elif, Hari Emre, Ulasoglu-Yildiz Çiğdem, Gurvit Hakan, Demiralp Tamer
Department of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, Demiroglu Bilim University, Istanbul, 34394, Turkey.
Department of Neuroscience, Aziz Sancar Institute of Experimental Medicine, Istanbul University, Istanbul, 34093, Turkey.
Neurol Sci. 2025 Jun;46(6):2601-2610. doi: 10.1007/s10072-025-08091-0. Epub 2025 Mar 8.
The functional connectivity (FC) of the amygdala in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and its relationship to cognitive impairment is still not well established. Thus, we examined resting-state FC changes in the amygdala among 21 patients with AD dementia (ADD) and 34 individuals with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), compared to 33 individuals with subjective cognitive impairment (SCI), to provide insights into the association between amygdala FC and cognitive decline in different clinical stages of Alzheimer's disease. We conducted seed-to-voxel FC analysis, focused on two cognitive functions, episodic memory, and face recognition, and examined the correlations between changes in FC of the amygdala and cognitive test scores. We demonstrated that the left amygdala exhibits progressive disruption in FC, especially with the frontal regions in aMCI and ADD. We further identified that this disrupted FC in the left amygdala showed significant positive correlations with cognitive test scores from the MCI stage onward. Our results indicate that FC changes in the left amygdala may serve as an early marker of AD and this FC pattern of amygdala influence detrimentally affects episodic memory and face recognition functions. These findings highlight that the amygdala may be a critical anatomical region for detecting the early stages of AD.
杏仁核在阿尔茨海默病（AD）中的功能连接性（FC）及其与认知障碍的关系仍未完全明确。因此，我们研究了21例AD痴呆（ADD）患者和34例遗忘型轻度认知障碍（aMCI）个体的杏仁核静息态FC变化，并与33例主观认知障碍（SCI）个体进行比较，以深入了解杏仁核FC与阿尔茨海默病不同临床阶段认知衰退之间的关联。我们进行了种子点到体素的FC分析，重点关注情景记忆和人脸识别这两种认知功能，并检查了杏仁核FC变化与认知测试分数之间的相关性。我们发现，左侧杏仁核的FC呈现进行性破坏，尤其是在aMCI和ADD中与额叶区域的连接。我们进一步确定，左侧杏仁核这种破坏的FC从MCI阶段开始与认知测试分数呈显著正相关。我们的结果表明，左侧杏仁核的FC变化可能是AD的早期标志物，并且这种杏仁核FC模式对情景记忆和人脸识别功能产生有害影响。这些发现突出表明，杏仁核可能是检测AD早期阶段的关键解剖区域。
