MEG activity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during optic flow stimulations detects mild cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer's disease

PLoS One. 2021 Nov 5;16(11):e0259677. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0259677. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

Dorsal stream, which has a neuronal connection with dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), is known to be responsible for detection of motion including optic flow perception. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), this study aimed to examine neural responses to optic flow stimuli with looming motion in the DLPFC in patients with mild cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer's disease (AD-MCI) compared with cognitively unimpaired participants (CU). We analyzed the neural responses by evaluating maximum source-localized power for the AD-MCI group (n = 11) and CU (n = 20), focusing on six regions of interest (ROIs) that form the DLPFC: right and left dorsal Brodmann area 9/46 (A9/46d), Brodmann area 46 (A46) and ventral Brodmann area 9/46 (A9/46v). We found significant differences in the maximum power between the groups in the left A46 and A9/46v. Moreover, in the left A9/46v, the maximum power significantly correlated with the Wechsler Memory Scale-Revised general memory score and delayed recall score. The maximum power in the left A9/46v also revealed high performance in AD-MCI versus CU classification with the area under the ROC curve of 0.90. This study demonstrated that MEG during the optic flow task can be useful in discriminating AD-MCI from CU.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Alzheimer Disease*
  • Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex*
  • Humans
  • ROC Curve

Grants and funding

This study was supported in part by a Grant for the Hokuriku Innovation Cluster for Health Science (to M.Y) from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.