ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Neurol.
Sec. Applied Neuroimaging
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fneur.2025.1585354
Altered interhemispheric functional connectivity in end-stage renal disease patients receiving hemodialysis without cognitive impairment
Provisionally accepted
- 1Affiliated Hospital of Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Jinan, Shandong Province, China
- 2The 960th Hospital, People's Liberation Army General Hospital, Jinan, China
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Previous studies have shown that alterations in brain structure, metabolism, and function are prevalent in patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD); however, the synchronization of early functional changes between the two functional hemispheres in these patients remains unclear. This study aimed to analyze interhemispheric functional connectivity in patients with ESRD using resting-state fMRI with voxel-mirrored homotopic connectivity (VMHC) algorithm. The study cohort comprised 36 patients with ESRD receiving hemodialysis without cognitive impairment and 34 matched healthy control (HCs). A battery of neuropsychological and laboratory tests was performed before MR scanning. Compared with HCs, patients with ESRD exhibited significantly decreased VMHC values in bilateral regions including the inferior parietal lobule/angular gyrus, superior temporal gyrus, insula, precentral gyrus, middle occipital gyrus, calcarine/cuneus, and lingual gyrus. No brain regions showed increased VMHC values. Although patients with ESRD had no clinically significant cognitive impairment, their performance on neuropsychological tests (e.g. Mini-Mental State Examination, Montreal Cognitive Assessment, Self-Rated Anxiety Scale, and Self-Rated Depression Scale) was significantly worse than that of HCs (all p＝0.001). Notably, no correlations were observed between VMHC values and neuropsychological test scores or clinical indicators in patients with ESRD (all p﹥0.05). Our findings suggest that interhemispheric connectivity is impaired in patients with ESRD without cognitive impairment and provides new insights into early-stage neural abnormalities in this population.
Keywords: end-stage renal disease, hemodialysis, Voxel-mirrored homotopic connectivity, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Cognition
Received: 11 Mar 2025; Accepted: 13 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Xue, Li, Qian, Sun, Jia and Kai. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Liu Kai, The 960th Hospital, People's Liberation Army General Hospital, Jinan, China
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