Consistent decreased activity in the putamen in Parkinson's disease: A meta-analysis and an independent validation of resting-state fMRI.

Gigascience. 2018 Jun 18;:

Authors: Wang J, Zhang JR, Zang YF, Wu T

Abstract
Background: Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (RS-fMRI) has frequently been used to investigate local spontaneous brain activity in Parkinson's disease (PD) in a whole-brain, voxel-wise manner. To quantitatively integrate these studies, we conducted a coordinate-based meta-analysis (CB meta-analysis), using the seed-based d mapping (SDM) method, on 15 studies that used amplitude of low frequency fluctuation (ALFF) and 11 studies that used regional homogeneity (ReHo). All these ALFF and ReHo studies have compared PD patients with healthy controls. We also performed a validation RS-fMRI study of ALFF and ReHo in a frequency-dependent manner for a novel dataset consisting of 49 PD and 49 healthy controls.
Findings: Decreased ALFF was found in the left putamen in PD by meta-analysis. This finding was replicated in our independent validation dataset in the 0.027 - 0.073 Hz band, but not in the conventional frequency band of 0.01 - 0.08 Hz.
Conclusions: Findings from the current study suggested that decreased ALFF in the putamen of PD is the most consistent finding. RS-fMRI is a promising technique for the precise localization of abnormal spontaneous activity in PD. However, more frequency-dependent studies using the same analytical methods are needed to replicate these results.

PMID: 29917066 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]