NeuroImage. Clinical
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NeuroImage. Clinical · Jan 2015
Measuring longitudinal myelin water fraction in new multiple sclerosis lesions.
Investigating the potential of myelin repair strategies in multiple sclerosis (MS) requires an understanding of myelin dynamics during lesion evolution. The objective of this study is to longitudinally measure myelin water fraction (MWF), an MRI biomarker of myelin, in new MS lesions and to identify factors that influence their subsequent myelin content. ⋯ FAST T2 provides a clinically feasible method to quantify MWF in new MS lesions. The observed influence of baseline MWF, which represents a combined effect of both resolving edema and myelin change within acute lesions, suggests that the extent of initial inflammation impacts final myelin recovery.
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NeuroImage. Clinical · Jan 2015
Altered cognition-related brain activity and interactions with acute pain in migraine.
Little is known about the effect of migraine on neural cognitive networks. However, cognitive dysfunction is increasingly being recognized as a comorbidity of chronic pain. Pain appears to affect cognitive ability and the function of cognitive networks over time, and decrements in cognitive function can exacerbate affective and sensory components of pain. ⋯ These regions have been reported to have decreased cortical thickness and cognitive-related deactivation within other pain populations, and are also associated with pain regulation, suggesting that the current findings may reflect altered cognitive function and top-down regulation of pain. During pain conditions, patients had decreased task-related activity, but more widespread task-related reductions in pain-related activity, compared to controls, suggesting cognitive resources may be diverted from task-related to pain-reduction-related processes in migraine. Overall, these findings suggest that migraine is associated with altered cognitive-related neural activity, which may reflect altered pain regulatory processes as well as broader functional restructuring.
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NeuroImage. Clinical · Jan 2015
White matter and reading deficits after pediatric traumatic brain injury: A diffusion tensor imaging study.
Pediatric traumatic brain injury often results in significant long-term deficits in mastery of reading ability. This study aimed to identify white matter pathways that, when damaged, predicted reading deficits in children. Based on the dual-route model of word reading, we predicted that integrity of the inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus would be related to performance in sight word identification while integrity of the superior longitudinal fasciculus would be related to performance in phonemic decoding. ⋯ No association was identified between the inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus and sight word reading or phonemic decoding. Reading fluency was associated with the integrity of the cingulum bundle. These findings support dissociable pathways predicting word reading and fluency using Diffusion Tensor Imaging and provide additional information for developing models of acquired reading deficits by specifying areas of brain damage which may predict reading deficits following recovery from the acute phase of TBI.
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NeuroImage. Clinical · Jan 2015
Altered resting brain connectivity in persistent cancer related fatigue.
There is an estimated 3 million women in the US living as breast cancer survivors and persistent cancer related fatigue (PCRF) disrupts the lives of an estimated 30% of these women. PCRF is associated with decreased quality of life, decreased sleep quality, impaired cognition and depression. The mechanisms of cancer related fatigue are not well understood; however, preliminary findings indicate dysfunctional activity in the brain as a potential factor. ⋯ These findings indicate that there is enhanced intrinsic DMN connectivity to the frontal gyrus in breast cancer survivors with persistent fatigue. As the DMN is a network involved in self-referential thinking we speculate that enhanced connectivity between the DMN and the frontal gyrus may be related to mental fatigue and poor sleep quality. In contrast, enhanced connectivity between the DMN and regions in the subgenual cingulate and brainstem may serve a protective function in the non-fatigued group.
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NeuroImage. Clinical · Jan 2015
Evoked itch perception is associated with changes in functional brain connectivity.
Chronic itch, a highly debilitating condition, has received relatively little attention in the neuroimaging literature. Recent studies suggest that brain regions supporting itch in chronic itch patients encompass sensorimotor and salience networks, and corticostriatal circuits involved in motor preparation for scratching. However, how these different brain areas interact with one another in the context of itch is still unknown. ⋯ A seed-based analysis revealed decreased functional connectivity from baseline resting state to the evoked-itch state between several itch-related brain regions, particularly the insular and cingulate cortices and basal ganglia, where decreased connectivity was significantly correlated with increased levels of perceived itch. In contrast, evoked itch increased connectivity between key nodes of the frontoparietal control network (superior parietal lobule and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex), where higher increase in connectivity was correlated with a lesser increase in perceived itch, suggesting that greater interaction between nodes of this executive attention network serves to limit itch sensation via enhanced top-down regulation. Overall, our results provide the first evidence of itch-dependent changes in functional connectivity across multiple brain regions.