Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment (Dec 2015)

Altered intrinsic regional spontaneous brain activity in patients with optic neuritis: a resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging study

  • Shao Y,
  • Cai FQ,
  • Zhong YL,
  • Huang X,
  • Zhang Y,
  • Hu PH,
  • Pei CG,
  • Zhou FQ,
  • Zeng XJ

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2015, no. Issue 1
pp. 3065 – 3073

Abstract

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Yi Shao,1,* Feng-Qin Cai,2,* Yu-Lin Zhong,1 Xin Huang,1,3 Ying Zhang,1 Pei-Hong Hu,1 Chong-Gang Pei,1 Fu-Qing Zhou,2 Xian-Jun Zeng2 1Department of Ophthalmology, 2Department of Radiology, First Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang University, Nanchang, 3Department of Ophthalmology, First People’s Hospital of Jiujiang, Jiujiang, People’s Republic of China *These authors contributed equally to this work Objective: To investigate the underlying regional homogeneity (ReHo) in brain-activity deficit in patients with optic neuritis (ON) and its relationship with behavioral performance.Materials and methods: In total, twelve patients with ON (four males and eight females) and twelve (four males and eight females) age-, sex-, and education-matched healthy controls underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scans. The ReHo method was used to assess the local features of spontaneous brain activity. Correlation analysis was used to explore the relationship between the observed mean ReHo values of the different brain areas and the visual evoked potential (VEP) in patients with ON.Results: Compared with the healthy controls, patients with ON showed lower ReHo in the left cerebellum, posterior lobe, left middle temporal gyrus, right insula, right superior temporal gyrus, left middle frontal gyrus, bilateral anterior cingulate cortex, left superior frontal gyrus, right superior frontal gyrus, and right precentral gyrus, and higher ReHo in the cluster of the left fusiform gyrus and right inferior parietal lobule. Meanwhile, we found that the VEP amplitude of the right eye in patients with ON showed a positive correlation with the ReHo signal value of the left cerebellum posterior lobe (r=0.701, P=0.011), the right superior frontal gyrus (r=0.731, P=0.007), and the left fusiform gyrus (r=0.644, P=0.024). We also found that the VEP latency of the right eye in ON showed a positive correlation with the ReHo signal value of the right insula (r=0.595, P=0.041).Conclusion: ON may involve dysfunction in the default-mode network, which may reflect the underlying pathologic mechanism. Keywords: optic neuritis, regional homogeneity, rs-fMRI, visual evoked potential 

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