Altered functional association and couplings: Effective diagnostic neuromarkers for Alzheimer's disease

Chongyi Zhao; Meiling Chen; Zhiyong Ding; Chunyan Liu; Xiaomei Wu

doi:10.3389/fnagi.2022.1009632

Altered functional association and couplings: Effective diagnostic neuromarkers for Alzheimer's disease

Front Aging Neurosci. 2022 Oct 13:14:1009632. doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2022.1009632. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Chongyi Zhao^{1

2}, Meiling Chen³, Zhiyong Ding⁴, Chunyan Liu^{5

6}, Xiaomei Wu²

Affiliations

¹ Faculty of Life Science and Technology, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming, China.
² Department of Gynecology, The First People's Hospital of Yunnan Province, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming, China.
³ Department of Clinical Psychology, The First People's Hospital of Yunnan Province, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming, China.
⁴ Department of Medical Imaging, Qujing Maternal and Child Health Care Hospital, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Qujing, China.
⁵ Department of Neurology, Xuanwu Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, China.
⁶ Beijing Key Laboratory of Neuromodulation, Beijing, China.

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a common neurodegenerative disorder causing dementia in the elderly population. Functional disconnection of brain is considered to be the main cause of AD. In this study, we applied a newly developed association (Asso) mapping approach to directly quantify the functional disconnections and to explore the diagnostic effects for AD with resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data from 36 AD patients and 42 age-, gender-, and education-matched healthy controls (HC). We found that AD patients showed decreased Asso in left dorsoanterior insula (INS) while increased functional connections of INS with right medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and left posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). The changed Asso and functional connections were closely associated with cognitive performances. In addition, the reduced Asso and increased functional connections could serve as effective neuromarkers to distinguish AD patients from HC. Our research provided new evidence for functional disconnections in AD and demonstrated that functional disconnections between cognition-memory networks may be potential early biomarkers for AD.

Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease; association mapping; biomarker; disconnection; functional connectivity.