近日，实验室学术骨干、东莞市人民医院神经内科学科主任陈仰昆所带领的团队在卒中后社会认知功能应用结构和功能MRI混合分析研究中取得进展，相关成果以“Structural-informed functional MRI analysis of patients with empathy impairment following stroke”为题发表在《J Psychiatry&Neurosci》期刊上，陈仰昆主任为本论文的共同通讯作者。
研究背景和方法
The underlying functional alterations of brain structural changes among patients with empathy impairment following stroke remain unclear. We sought to investigate functional connectivity changes informed by brain structural abnormalities in multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) among patients with empathy impairment following stroke.
We enrolled people who had experienced their first ischemic stroke, along with healthy controls. We assessed empathy 3 months after stroke using the Chinese version of the Empathy Quotient (EQ). During the acute phase, all patients underwent basic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), followed by multimodal MRI during follow-up. Our MRI analyses encompassed acute infarction segmentation, volumetric brain measurements, regional quantification of diffusion parameters, and both region-of-interest–based and seed-based functional connectivity assessments. We grouped patients based on the severity of their empathy impairment for comparative analysis.
研究结果和结论
We included 84 patients who had stroke and 22 healthy controls. Patients had lower EQ scores than controls. Patients with low empathy had larger left cortical infarcts (odds ratio [OR] 4.082, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.183–14.088), more pronounced atrophy in the right cingulate cortex (OR 1.248, 95% CI 1.038–1.502), and lower scores on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (OR 0.873, 95% CI 0.74–0.947). In addition, the cingulate cortex served as the seed in the seed-based analysis, which showed heightened functional connectivity between the anterior cingulate gyrus and the right superior parietal lobule, specifically in the low-empathy group.
Among patients with subacute ischemic stroke, reduced empathy was strongly associated with a more severe cognitive profile and atrophy of the right cingulate cortex. Our subsequent structural-informed functional MRI analysis suggests that the enhanced connectivity between the anterior cingulate gyrus and the superior parietal lobule may function as a compensatory mechanism for this atrophy.
文章链接：
https://doi.org/10.1503/jpn.240084
