AUTHOR=Li Chang , Jin Rongbing , Liu Kaijun , Li Yang , Zuo Zhiwei , Tong Haipeng , Zhang Jingna , Zhang Junfeng , Guo Yu , Lai Yuqi , Sun Jinju , Wang Jian , Xiong Kunlin , Chen Xiao 

TITLE=White Matter Atrophy in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus Patients With Mild Cognitive Impairment

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neuroscience

VOLUME=Volume 14 - 2020

YEAR=2021

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnins.2020.602501

DOI=10.3389/fnins.2020.602501

ISSN=1662-453X

ABSTRACT=Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patients are highly susceptible to developing dementia, especially for those with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), but its underlying cause is still unclear. In this study, we performed a battery of neuropsychological tests and high-resolution sagittal T1-weighted structural imaging to explore how T2DM affects white matter volume (WMV) and cognition in 30 T2MD-MCI patients, 30 T2DM with normal cognition (T2DM-NC) patients and 30 age-, sex-, and education-matched healthy control (HC) individuals. The WMV of the whole brain were obtained with automated segmentation methods. Correlations between the WMV of each brain region and neuropsychological tests were analyzed in the T2DM patients. The T2DM-NC patients and HC individuals did not reveal any significant differences in WMV. Compared with the T2DM-NC group, the T2DM-MCI group showed statistically significant reduction in the WMV of ten brain regions, mainly located in frontotemporal lobe and limbic system, eight of which significantly correlated with Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) scores. Subsequently, we evaluated the discriminative ability of these eight regions for MCI in T2DM patients. The WMV of four regions, including left posterior cingulate, precuneus, insula, and right rostral middle frontal gyrus had high diagnostic value for MCI detection in T2DM patients (AUC > 0.7). Among these four regions, left precuneus WMV presented best diagnostic value (AUC: 0.736; Sensitivity: 70.00%; Specificity: 73.33%; Youden index: 0.4333), but with no significant difference relative to the minimum AUC. In conclusion, T2DM could give rise to the white matter atrophy of several brain regions. Each WMV of left posterior cingulate, precuneus, insula, and right rostral middle frontal gyrus could be an independent imaging biomarker to detect cognitive impairment at early stage in T2DM patients and play an important role in its pathophysiological mechanism.