Resting-State Functional Connectivity Signatures of Apathy in Community-Living Older Adults - PubMed (original) (raw)

Resting-State Functional Connectivity Signatures of Apathy in Community-Living Older Adults

Jung Yun Jang et al. Front Aging Neurosci. 2021.

Abstract

Apathy predicts poor outcomes in older adults, and its underlying neural mechanism needs further investigation. We examined the association between symptoms of apathy and functional connectivity (FC) in older adults without stroke or dementia. Participants included 48 individuals (mean age = 70.90) living independently in the community, who underwent resting-state fMRI and completed the Apathy Evaluation Scale (AES). Seed-to-voxel analysis (cluster-level p-FDR <0.05, voxel threshold p < 0.001) tested the association between AES scores and the whole-brain FC of brain regions involved in reward- and salience-related processing. We found that AES scores were negatively associated with FC of the right insula cortex and right anterior temporal regions (124 voxels, t = -5.10) and FC of the left orbitofrontal cortex and anterior cingulate regions (160 voxels, t = -5.45), and were positively associated with FC of the left orbitofrontal cortex and left lateral prefrontal (282 voxels, t = 4.99) and anterior prefrontal (123 voxels, t = 4.52) regions. These findings suggest that apathy in older adults may reflect disruptions in neural connectivity involved in reward- and salience-related processing.

Keywords: apathy; functional connectivity; older adults; resting-state fMRI; reward processing; salience processing.

Copyright © 2021 Jang, Han, Yew, Blanken, Dutt, Li, Ho, Gaubert and Nation.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1

Figure 1

Functional connectivity map of the right IC (A,B) and left OFC (C,D) in relation to self-reported apathy symptoms. Models were adjusted for age. Left panel: Results shown in axial slices of the brain. Right panel: A 3-dimentional rendering of the inflated brain showing the results. Numbers on the color bars indicate peak voxel t-statistics. Statistical significance was determined by cluster p-FDR < 0.05 and voxel-level threshold p < 0.001. (A,B) Self-reported symptoms of apathy were negatively associated with neural connectivity between right IC ROI and a cluster of 124 voxels in the left anterior temporal regions (cluster 1, “c1”), including the right temporal pole (84 voxels) and right anterior middle temporal gyrus (25 voxels). (C,D) Self-rated symptoms of apathy were positively associated with neural connectivity between the left OFC ROI and a cluster of 282 voxels in the left lateral prefrontal regions (cluster 2, “c2”), including left middle frontal gyrus (268 voxels) and a cluster of 123 voxels in the anterior prefrontal regions (cluster 3, “c3”), including left superior frontal gyrus (73 voxels) and the left frontal pole (34 voxels). The symptoms were negatively associated with neural connectivity between the left OFC and a cluster of 160 voxels in the anterior cingulate regions (cluster 4, “c4”), including the left paracingulate gyrus (83 voxels) and the ACC (57 voxels).

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