The relationship between brain atrophy and brain network connection in Alzheimer's disease

Purpose: Researchers found that the connectome structure of the brain spreads atrophy of cortical and subcortical gray matter in a series of dementia diseases. Many researchers study the transmission mode of brain atrophy through brain networks. However, most of the evidence related to atrophy and brain network connectivity is at the pathological level, and the evidence of correlation at the network level is lacking.Subjects and Methods: A total of 378 subjects were included in our study, including 173 AD (88 women, mean age 75.3±7.6 years), and 205 normal controls (NC) (106 women, mean age 76.1 ±4.8 years). All data of the subjects were from T1 weighted data of the public dataset ADNI. In this paper, we first use the VBM method to analyze the gray matter difference between AD and NC. Then, the AAL template is used to divide the t map into brain regions. The correlation between node atrophy and neighbor atrophy is used as the verification indicator.Results: It is found that the node atrophy of AD is significantly related to their neighbor atrophy. As a control, when the random matrix is used as the brain network connection, there is no significant correlation between the node atrophy of AD and their neighbor atrophy.Conclusion: This study found that brain atrophy in AD patients was significantly related to its network connection, indicating that the propagation of brain atrophy in AD can be explained by network connection.