Scientific Reports (Jan 2024)

Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging indices are related to electrophysiological dysfunction in degenerative cervical myelopathy

  • Hironobu Akimoto,
  • Hidenori Suzuki,
  • Shigeyuki Kan,
  • Masahiro Funaba,
  • Norihiro Nishida,
  • Kazuhiro Fujimoto,
  • Hiroaki Ikeda,
  • Teppei Yonezawa,
  • Kojiro Ikushima,
  • Yoichiro Shimizu,
  • Toshio Matsubara,
  • Kenichiro Harada,
  • Shin Nakagawa,
  • Takashi Sakai

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-53051-x
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 14, no. 1
pp. 1 – 13

Abstract

Read online

Abstract The age-related degenerative pathologies of the cervical spinal column that comprise degenerative cervical myelopathy (DCM) cause myelopathy due spinal cord compression. Functional neurological assessment of DCM can potentially reveal the severity and pathological mechanism of DCM. However, functional assessment by conventional MRI remains difficult. This study used resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) to investigate the relationship between functional connectivity (FC) strength and neurophysiological indices and examined the feasibility of functional assessment by FC for DCM. Preoperatively, 34 patients with DCM underwent rs-fMRI scans. Preoperative central motor conduction time (CMCT) reflecting motor functional disability and intraoperative somatosensory evoked potentials (SEP) reflecting sensory functional disability were recorded as electrophysiological indices of severity of the cervical spinal cord impairment. We performed seed-to-voxel FC analysis and correlation analyses between FC strength and the two electrophysiological indices. We found that FC strength between the primary motor cortex and the precuneus correlated significantly positively with CMCT, and that between the lateral part of the sensorimotor cortex and the lateral occipital cortex also showed a significantly positive correlation with SEP amplitudes. These results suggest that we can evaluate neurological and electrophysiological severity in patients with DCM by analyzing FC strengths between certain brain regions.