Decreased Regional Homogeneity in Patients With Acute Mild Traumatic Brain Injury

Abstract

Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is characterized by structural disconnection and large-scale neural network dysfunction in the resting state. However, little is known concerning the intrinsic changes in local spontaneous brain activity in patients with mTBI. The aim of the current study was to assess regional synchronization in acute mTBI patients. Fifteen acute mTBI patients and 15 sex-, age-, and education-matched healthy controls (HCs) were studied. We used the regional homogeneity (ReHo) method to map local connectivity across the whole brain and performed a two-sample t-test between the two groups. Compared with HCs, patients with acute mTBI showed significantly decreased ReHo in the left insula, left precentral/postcentral gyrus, and left supramarginal gyrus (p < 0.05, AlphaSim corrected). The ReHo index of the left insula showed a positive correlation with the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores across all acute mTBI patients (p < 0.05, uncorrected). The ReHo method may provide an objective biomarker for evaluating the functional abnormity of mTBI in the acute setting.

Resting-State Magnetoencephalography Reveals Different Patterns of Aberrant Functional Connectivity in Combat-Related Mild Traumatic Brain Injury

“…Unlike the more traditional method of spectral coherence, PLS separates the phase and amplitude components and can be directly interpreted in the framework of neural integration. 80 In the present study, the frequency increments used in the Morlet wavelet transformation were at 0.5 Hz for the low-frequency band (1-7 Hz) and alpha band (8-12 Hz), at 1 Hz for the beta band (15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30), and at 2 Hz for the gamma band . Similar to the Xcorr approach, ROIglobal FC measures were obtained using the PLS approach as the ROI-global connectivity vector with 94 elements.…”

“…In contrast, activity in the beta band (15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30) is associated with communication among remote brain structures, whereas gamma band (30-80 Hz) synchrony promotes local computations. 88,89 Probably because of its role in long-range communication, most of the rs-MEG FC studies have focused on the beta band.…”

“…Red represents significant increases (correct p < 0.05), whereas blue represents significant decreases in FC. Top two rows: beta band (15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30). Middle two rows: gamma band .…”

“…Although disturbances in FC have been reported in many studies of mTBI, there are large discrepancies in the findings. For example, out of 25 resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) studies of mTBI, 6 showed only increased FC, [17][18][19][20][21][22] 9 showed only decreased FC, [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32] and 10 showed both increased FC in some brain networks/regions and decreased FC in other networks/regions. [33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41] Twenty-one of these rs-fMRI studies were concerned with blunt mTBI whereas only four were related to blast mTBI.…”

Regional Homogeneity Changes in Nicotine Addicts by Resting-State fMRI

“…The ReHo abnormalities are a potential biomarker for the diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, and they provide insights into the biological mechanism of the disease [28]. Zhan et al experimentally demonstrated that ReHo may provide an objective biomarker for evaluating the functional abnormity of mild traumatic brain injury under acute settings [29]. Liu et al proposed that ReHo is a potential neuroimaging biomarker for distinguishing bipolar disorder patients experiencing a depressive episode and unipolar depression patients [30].…”