AUTHOR=Tao Wuhai , Li Hehui , Li Xin , Huang Rong , Shao Wen , Guan Qing , Zhang Zhanjun 

TITLE=Progressive Brain Degeneration From Subjective Cognitive Decline to Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment: Evidence From Large-Scale Anatomical Connection Classification Analysis

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience

VOLUME=Volume 13 - 2021

YEAR=2021

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/aging-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnagi.2021.687530

DOI=10.3389/fnagi.2021.687530

ISSN=1663-4365

ABSTRACT=People with subjective cognitive decline (SCD) and amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) are both at high risk for Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Behaviorally, both SCD and aMCI have subjective reports of cognitive decline, but the latter suffers a severer objective cognitive impairment than the former. However, it remains unclear how the brain changes from SCD to aMCI. In the current study, we aimed to investigate the topology characteristics of the white matter (WM) network that can successfully identify individuals with SCD or aMCI from health control (HC), and to describe the relationship of pathological development between these two stages. To this end, three groups were recruited, including 22 SCD, 22 aMCI, and 22 health control (HC) subjects. We constructed WM network for each subject and compared large-scale topological organization between groups at both network-level and nodal-level. At the network-level, the combined network indexes had the best performance in discriminating aMCI from HC. But no indexes at the network-level can significantly identify SCD from HC. These results suggest that aMCI but not SCD was associated with anatomical impairments at the network level. At the nodal-level, we found that the short-path length can best differentiate aMCI and HC subjects, whereas the global efficiency can best differentiate SCD and HC subjects, suggesting that both SCD and aMCI had significant functional integration alteration compared to HC subjects. These results converge on the idea that the neural degeneration from SCD to aMCI follows a gradual process, from abnormalities at the nodal level to both nodal and network level.