Cortical Gray Matter and Hippocampal Atrophy in Idiopathic Rapid Eye Movement Sleep Behavior Disorder

Abstract

Objective: In this study we investigate cortical and subcortical gray matter structure in patients with Idiopathic REM-sleep behavior disorder (IRBD), and their relation to cognitive performance. Methods: This study includes a sample of 20 patients with polysomnography-confirmed IRBD and 27 healthy controls that underwent neuropsychological and T1-weighted MRI assessment. FreeSurfer was used to estimate cortical thickness, subcortical volumetry (version 5.1), and hippocampal subfields segmentation (version 6.0). FIRST, FSL's model-based segmentation/registration tool was used for hippocampal shape analysis. Results: Compared with healthy subjects, IRBD patients showed impairment in facial recognition, verbal memory, processing speed, attention, and verbal naming. IRBD patients had cortical thinning in left superior parietal, post-central, and fusiform regions, as well as in right superior frontal and lateral occipital regions. Volumetric and shape analyses found right hippocampal atrophy in IRBD, specifically in posterior regions. Hippocampal subfields exploratory analysis identified significant differences in the right CA1, molecular layer, granule cell layer of dentate gyrus, and CA4 of this patients. No correlations were found between cognitive performance and brain atrophy. Conclusion: This work confirms the presence of posterior based cognitive dysfunction, as well as cortical and right hippocampal atrophy in IRBD patients.

Cortical gray matter progression in idiopathic REM sleep behavior disorder and its relation to cognitive decline

“…As stated in the introduction, there is no previous research investigating brain changes in IRBD over time compared to normal aging. It is interesting noting that already in our cross-sectional study superior parietal thinning was identified in these patients ( Campabadal et al, 2019b ), with our current results, we highlight the involvement of parietal regions in the progression of IRBD. This predominantly posterior cortical pattern is similar to previous findings in PD and DLB ( Delli Pizzi et al, 2014 , Ramírez-Ruiz et al, 2007 , Segura et al, 2014 , Uribe et al, 2016 ).…”

“…Subjects were evaluated at baseline and after 1.6 ± 0.3 years for patients and 1.6 ± 0.2 years for controls of follow-up (U = 127; p = 0.97). All participants are part of a longitudinal cohort recruited between 2015 and 2017 ( Campabadal et al, 2019b ). IRBD patients were recruited from our sleep disorders center and none of them developed parkinsonism during the follow-up.…”

“…To date, there is a considerable amount of neuroimaging research showing structural ( Campabadal et al, 2019b , De Marzi et al, 2016 , Ehrminger et al, 2016 , Ellmore et al, 2010 , Hanyu et al, 2012 , Ohlhauser et al, 2019 , Park et al, 2018 , Pereira et al, 2019 , Pyatigorskaya et al, 2017 , Rahayel et al, 2015 , Rahayel et al, 2018a , Rahayel et al, 2018b , Scherfler et al, 2011 , Unger et al, 2010 ) and functional ( Byun et al, 2020 , Campabadal et al, 2020 , Dayan and Browner, 2017 , Ellmore et al, 2013 , Park et al, 2018 , Rolinski et al, 2016 ) abnormalities in IRBD patients using MRI. Most importantly, owing to all these works, there is strong evidence that brain changes relate to cognitive impairment ( Byun et al, 2020 , Campabadal et al, 2020 , Pereira et al, 2019 , Rahayel et al, 2018b , Vendette et al, 2012 ) and olfactory loss ( Campabadal et al, 2019a , Pereira et al, 2019 , Rahayel et al, 2018b , Vendette et al, 2011 ).…”

Probable REM sleep behavior disorder is associated with longitudinal cortical thinning in Parkinson’s disease

“…Moreover, to our knowledge, no study to date has investigated the effect of the early presence of RBD on the pattern of brain atrophy overtime in PD. As a sensitive marker of gray matter atrophy, cortical thinning has been associated with idiopathic RBD 20 , 21 , PD with concomitant RBD 22 , and a risk of conversion to a Lewy body disorder in idiopathic RBD patients 23 . Therefore, in this study, we investigated the association between RBD and changes of cortical thickness and subcortical volumes in early, de novo PD patients from the Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI) project 24 ( http://www.ppmi-info.org ), cross-sectionally and longitudinally.…”

FreeSurfer based segmentation of hippocampal subfields: a review of methods and applications, with a novel quality control procedure for ENIGMA studies and other collaborative efforts

“…PTSD (Bøen et al, 2014;Chen et al, 2016;Averill et al, 2017;Hayes et al, 2017), childhood maltreatment (Teicher et al, 2012;Chalavi et al, 2015), verbal abuse , childhood trauma in schizophrenia and healthy controls (du Plessis et al, 2019), in bipolar disorders and healthy controls (Janiri et al, 2019a) and in adolescence (Malhi et al, 2019) Other neuropsychiatric conditions Pain symptoms (Ezzati et al, 2014), ADHD (Al-Amin et al, 2018), anorexia nervosa (Myrvang et al, 2018), obsessive compulsive disorder (Zhang et al, 2019), and transient global amnesia (Wang et al, 2018b), essential tremor (Prasad et al, 2019), rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder (Campabadal et al, 2019), trigeminal neuralgia (Vaculik et al, 2019) Thalamic infarction (Chen et al, 2016), sequelae of microsurgical aneurysm clipping (Hedderich et al, 2019)…”