AUTHOR=Wan Song , Xia Wen Qing , Zhong Yu Lin 

TITLE=Aberrant Interhemispheric Functional Connectivity in Diabetic Retinopathy Patients

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neuroscience

VOLUME=Volume 15 - 2021

YEAR=2021

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnins.2021.792264

DOI=10.3389/fnins.2021.792264

ISSN=1662-453X

ABSTRACT=Background: accumulating evidences demonstrated that diabetic retinopathy(DR) patients showed an increased risk of cognitive decline and dementia relates to abnormalities in brain's functional connectivity (FC). Whereas the alterations of interhemispheric coordination pattern occurring in DR are not well understood. Our study was to investigate interhemispheric FC of the whole brain in DR patients using a voxel-mirrored homotopic connectivity (VMHC) method. 
Methods: Thirty-four DR individuals (19 males and 15 females: mean age: 52.97±8.35 years) and Thirty-eight health controls (HC) (16 males and 21 females; mean age: 53.78±53.78 years) closely matched for age, sex, and education, underwent resting-state magnetic resonance imaging scans. VMHC method was conducted to investigate the different interhemispheric FC between two groups. And then, seed-based FC method was applied to extract correlation coefficient matrix among each pair of brain regions of decreased VMHC in a voxel-wise manner. Pearson's correlation coefficient was conducted to assess the relationship between the VMHC index and clinical variables in DR groups.  
Results: Compared with HC groups, DR groups showed decreased VMHC values in the bilateral middle temporal gyrus (MTG), lingual/calcarine/middle occipital gyrus(LING/CAL/MOG), superior temporal gyrus(STG), angular (ANG), postcentral gyrus (PosCG), inferior parietal lobule (IPL) and precentral gyrus(PreCG), (two tailed, voxel-level: P<0.01, Gaussian random field [GRF] correction, cluster-level: P<0.05). Meanwhile, for seed-based FC analysis, altered FC includes the regions of auditory network, visual network, default mode network, salience network and sensorimotor network. Moreover, A significant positive correlation was observed between the visual acuity-OD and zVMHC values in the bilateral LING/CAL/MOG (r=0.551, p=0.001) and STG(r=0.426, p=0.012) and PosCG((r=0.494, p=0.003) and (r=0.459,p=0.006) in DR patients.
Conclusion: Our results hightlight that DR patients are associated with substantial impairment of interhemispheric coordination in auditory network, visual network, default mode network, and sensorimotor network. These findings offer an important insight into underlying the neural mechanism of DR patients .