Parkinson's disease may disrupt overlapping subthalamic nucleus and pallidal motor networks

Alejandro N Santos; Ferath Kherif; Lester Melie-Garcia; Antoine Lutti; Alessio Chiappini; Laurèl Rauschenbach; Thiemo F Dinger; Christoph Riess; Amir El Rahal; Marvin Darkwah Oppong; Ulrich Sure; Philipp Dammann; Bogdan Draganski

doi:10.1016/j.nicl.2023.103432

Parkinson's disease may disrupt overlapping subthalamic nucleus and pallidal motor networks

Neuroimage Clin. 2023:38:103432. doi: 10.1016/j.nicl.2023.103432. Epub 2023 May 13.

Affiliations

¹ Laboratory of Research in Neuroimaging (LREN) -Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Lausanne University Hospital and University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland; Department of Neurosurgery, University Hospital Essen, Essen, Germany; Center for Translational Neuroscience and Behavioral Science (C-TNBS), University of Duisburg, Essen, Germany.
² Laboratory of Research in Neuroimaging (LREN) -Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Lausanne University Hospital and University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.
³ Department of Neurosurgery, University Hospital Basel, Basel, Switzerland.
⁴ Department of Neurosurgery, University Hospital Essen, Essen, Germany; Center for Translational Neuroscience and Behavioral Science (C-TNBS), University of Duisburg, Essen, Germany.
⁵ Department of Neurosurgery, University Hospital Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany.
⁶ Laboratory of Research in Neuroimaging (LREN) -Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Lausanne University Hospital and University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland; Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany. Electronic address: bogdan.draganski@chuv.ch.

Abstract

There is an ongoing debate about differential clinical outcome and associated adverse effects of deep brain stimulation (DBS) in Parkinson's disease (PD) targeting the subthalamic nucleus (STN) or the globus pallidus pars interna (GPi). Given that functional connectivity profiles suggest beneficial DBS effects within a common network, the empirical evidence about the underlying anatomical circuitry is still scarce. Therefore, we investigate the STN and GPi-associated structural covariance brain patterns in PD patients and healthy controls. We estimate GPi's and STN's whole-brain structural covariance from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in a normative mid- to old-age community-dwelling cohort (n = 1184) across maps of grey matter volume, magnetization transfer (MT) saturation, longitudinal relaxation rate (R1), effective transversal relaxation rate (R2*) and effective proton density (PD*). We compare these with the structural covariance estimates in patients with idiopathic PD (n = 32) followed by validation using a reduced size controls' cohort (n = 32). In the normative data set, we observed overlapping spatially distributed cortical and subcortical covariance patterns across maps confined to basal ganglia, thalamus, motor, and premotor cortical areas. Only the subcortical and midline motor cortical areas were confirmed in the reduced size cohort. These findings contrasted with the absence of structural covariance with cortical areas in the PD cohort. We interpret with caution the differential covariance maps of overlapping STN and GPi networks in patients with PD and healthy controls as correlates of motor network disruption. Our study provides face validity to the proposed extension of the currently existing structural covariance methods based on morphometry features to multiparameter MRI sensitive to brain tissue microstructure.

Keywords: Magnetic resonance imaging; Multi-parameter mapping; Parkinson’s disease; Structural covariance; Voxel-based morphometry; Voxel-based quantification.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Basal Ganglia
Deep Brain Stimulation* / methods
Globus Pallidus / diagnostic imaging
Humans
Parkinson Disease* / diagnostic imaging
Parkinson Disease* / therapy
Subthalamic Nucleus*