Incongruent gray matter atrophy and functional connectivity of striatal subregions in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia

Abstract Previous studies on the striatum demonstrated that it is involved in the regulation of cognitive function and psychiatric symptoms in patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). Multiple lines of evidence have shown that striatal subregions have their own functions. However, the results of the existing studies on striatal subregions are inconsistent and unclear. In this study, we found that structural imaging analysis revealed that the bvFTD patients had smaller volumes of striatal subregions than the controls. We found that the degree of atrophy varied across the striatal subregions. Additionally, the right striatal subregions were significantly more atrophic than the left in bvFTD. Functional imaging analysis revealed that bvFTD patients exhibited different changed patterns of resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) when striatal subregions were selected as regions of interest (ROI). The RSFC extending range on the right ROIs was more significant than on the left in the same subregion. Interestingly, the RSFC of the subregions extending to the insula were consistent. In addition, the left dorsolateral putamen may be involved in executive function regulation. This suggests that incongruence in striatal subregions may be critical to the bvFTD characteristics.