Cerebral microinfarcts affect brain structural network topology in cognitively impaired patients

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Abstract

Cerebral microinfarcts (CMIs), a novel cerebrovascular marker, are prevalent in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and associated with cognitive impairment. Nonetheless, the underlying mechanism of how CMIs influence cognition remains uncertain. We hypothesized that cortical-CMIs disrupted structural connectivity in the higher-order cognitive networks, leading to cognitive impairment. We analyzed diffusion-MRI data of 92 AD (26 with cortical-CMIs) and 110 cognitive impairment no dementia patients (CIND, 28 with cortical-CMIs). We compared structural network topology between groups with and without cortical-CMIs in AD/CIND, and tested whether structural connectivity mediated the association between cortical-CMIs and cognition. Cortical-CMIs correlated with impaired structural network topology (i.e. lower efficiency/degree centrality in the executive control/dorsal attention networks in CIND, and lower clustering coefficient in the default mode/dorsal attention networks in AD), which mediated the association of cortical-CMIs with visuoconstruction dysfunction. Our findings provide the first in vivo human evidence that cortical-CMIs impair cognition in elderly via disrupting structural connectivity.

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Zhang, L., Biessels, G. J., Hilal, S., Chong, J. S. X., Liu, S., Shim, H. Y., … Zhou, J. H. (2021). Cerebral microinfarcts affect brain structural network topology in cognitively impaired patients. Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism, 41(1), 105–115. https://doi.org/10.1177/0271678X20902187

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