HIV infection across aging: Synergistic effects on intrinsic functional connectivity of the brain

Functional brain network reorganization in HIV infection

“…Our findings are in line with previous works, which show on DMN changes as well as the involvement of the caudate nucleus in HIV 16,34,60 . Taken together, these results are in accordance with a recently highlighted progressive and gradual reorganization of brain networks, which could subserve the maintenance of cognitive processes 37 …”

“…However, our HIV‐positive naïve patients as well as HIV‐positive patients on longer cART (>6 months) showed greater brain network reorganization (when compared to controls) as evidenced through all disruption indices. This is in contrast with Egbert et al., who found an increase in rs‐functional connectivity in HIV‐positive patients stabilized on antiretroviral treatment 37 . These results may be due to the greater sensitivity of the disruption index k in detecting subtle changes in brain networks, as well as to the different nature of the metrics analyzed between the two papers.…”

“…16,34,60 Taken together, these results are in accordance with a recently highlighted progressive and gradual reorganization of brain networks, which could subserve the maintenance of cognitive processes. 37 Finally, we observed a differential distribution of HIV clinical biomarkers and some rs-fMRI metrics according to the duration of cART. As expected, longer therapy was monotonically associated with lower viral load, confirming the efficacy of cART in our HIV patient population.…”

“…While previous studies on rs-fMRI in HIV-positive patients reported functional changes in a particular set of regions often termed the default mode network (DMN), 16,33,34 as well as possible associations with clinical variables, these results mainly focused on cortical and cortical-subcortical connections and not on subcortical and infratentorial regions. 2,16,35,36 Further TA B L E 7 Graph-theoretical metrics in which significant differences across the three cART duration groups were found functional connectivity studies analyzed the role of HCV coinfection in HIV-positive patients, finding interactions and synergic effects of HCV in HIV-related brain functional modification in particular along the fronto-striatal network, and aging showing reorganization of the brain networks in HIV-positive patients; 15,21,37 however, these studies did not study possible associations between brain markers and biochemical variables. Also, we observed functional rearrangement of 16 hubs located at supra and infratentorial brain with higher hubs density in the cerebellum, frontal, and occipital lobes.…”

Human immunodeficiency virus‐related decreases in corpus callosal integrity and corresponding increases in functional connectivity

“…Although there is work done on PLWH showing increased connectivity, there is also a relatively sizeable literature reporting no significant abnormalities in connectivity in canonical functional brain networks in PLWH (A.Z. Abidin et al, 2018;Egbert et al, 2018;Egbert et al, 2019;Guha et al, 2016;Janssen et al, 2017;Wang et al, 2011); our work provides a potential explanation. Structural degradation can impact brain function (Honey et al, 2010), but the functional connectivity within canonical functional networks does not have a one-to-one relationship with structural connectivity (Misic et al, 2016).…”