Altered Static and Dynamic Interhemispheric Resting-State Functional Connectivity in Patients With Thyroid-Associated Ophthalmopathy

Abstract

Purpose: Thyroid-associated ophthalmopathy (TAO) is a debilitating and sight-threatening autoimmune disease that severely impairs patients’ quality of life. Besides the most common ophthalmic manifestations, the emotional and psychiatric disturbances are also usually observed in clinical settings. This study was to investigate the interhemispheric functional connectivity alterations in TAO patients using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI).Methods: Twenty-eight TAO patients and 22 healthy controls (HCs) underwent rs-fMRI scans. Static and dynamic voxel-mirrored homotopic connectivity (VMHC) values were calculated and compared between the two groups. A linear support vector machine (SVM) classifier was used to examine the performance of static and dynamic VMHC differences in distinguishing TAOs from HCs.Results: Compared with HCs, TAOs showed decreased static VMHC in lingual gyrus (LG)/calcarine (CAL), middle occipital gyrus, postcentral gyrus, superior parietal lobule, inferior parietal lobule, and precuneus. Meanwhile, TAOs demonstrated increased dynamic VMHC in orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). In TAOs, static VMHC in LG/CAL was positively correlated with visual acuity (r = 0.412, P = 0.036), whilst dynamic VMHC in OFC was positively correlated with Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale (HARS) score (r = 0.397, P = 0.044) and Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS) score (r = 0.401, P = 0.042). The SVM model showed good performance in distinguishing TAOs from HCs (area under the curve, 0.971; average accuracy, 94%).Conclusion: TAO patients had altered static and dynamic VMHC in the occipital, parietal, and orbitofrontal areas, which could serve as neuroimaging prediction markers of TAO.

Altered dynamic brain activity and functional connectivity in thyroid‐associated ophthalmopathy

“…The decreased dFC between these two brain regions would be an indicator that the functional transmission of the dorsal visual stream might be disrupted in TAO. In addition, abnormalities in dorsal visual stream have also been reported in previous rs‐fMRI studies of TAO (Chen, Hu, Wu, Chen, Zhou, Chen, Xu, & Wu, 2021 ; Jiang et al, 2022 ), which further confirmed our hypothesis. Interestingly, the STG and TPOsup of TAO in our dALFF results showed higher temporal variability of brain activity.…”

Altered Long- and Short-Range Functional Connectivity Density in Patients With Thyroid-Associated Ophthalmopathy: A Resting-State fMRI Study

“…Functional connectivity belongs to a useful measurement reflecting changes of brain functional integration ( 14 ), while it was seldom focused in studies on TAO. Until now, only one study reported the interhemispheric functional connectivity alterations of TAO using voxel-mirrored homotopic connectivity ( 15 ). However, it ignored the interregional and intraregional functional interactions of the brain.…”

Increased brain iron in patients with thyroid-associated ophthalmopathy: a whole-brain analysis

“…found that the changes of gray matter volume in PCU were associated with affective and cognitive dysfunctions in active TAO ( 36 ). Decreased voxel-mirrored homotopic connectivity of PCU was also found in TAO in a resting-state functional MRI study ( 10 ). CUN is a wedge-shaped area of the occipital lobe, which is well known as an important part of visual path.…”

“…The significance of classification accuracy was validated using a non-parametric permutation test with 5000 permutations. All detailed steps of SVM analysis could be referred to a previous study ( 10 ).…”