| Literature DB >> 36161148 |
Simon Skau1,2, Birgitta Johansson1, Hans-Georg Kuhn1, William Hedley Thompson3,4.
Abstract
Pathological fatigue is present when fatigue is perceived to continually interfere with everyday life. Pathological fatigue has been linked with a dysfunction in the cortico-striatal-thalamic circuits. Previous studies have investigated measures of functional connectivity, such as modularity to quantify levels of segregation. However, previous results have shown both increases and decreases in segregation for pathological fatigue. There are multiple factors why previous studies might have differing results, including: (i) Does the functional connectivity of patients with pathological fatigue display more segregation or integration compared to healthy controls? (ii) Do network properties differ depending on whether patients with pathological fatigue perform a task compared to periods of rest? (iii) Are the brain networks of patients with pathological fatigue and healthy controls differently affected by prolonged cognitive activity? We recruited individuals suffering from pathological fatigue after mild traumatic brain injury (n = 20) and age-matched healthy controls (n = 20) to perform cognitive tasks for 2.5 h. We used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to assess hemodynamic changes in the frontal cortex. The participants had a resting state session before and after the cognitive test session. Cognitive testing included the Digit Symbol Coding test at the beginning and the end of the procedure to measure processing speed. We conducted an exploratory network analysis on these resting state and Digit Symbol Coding sessions with no a priori hypothesis relating to how patients and controls differ in their functional networks since previous research has found results in both directions. Our result showed a Group vs. Time interaction (p = 0.026, η p 2 = 0.137), with a post hoc test revealing that the TBI patients developed higher modularity toward the end of the cognitive test session. This work helps to identify how functional networks differ under pathological fatigue compared to healthy controls. Further, it shows how the functional networks dynamically change over time as the patient performs tasks over a time scale that affect their fatigue level.Entities:
Keywords: connectivity; fNIRS; fatigability; modularity; pathological fatigue; state fatigue
Year: 2022 PMID: 36161148 PMCID: PMC9492975 DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2022.972720
Source DB: PubMed Journal: Front Neurosci ISSN: 1662-453X Impact factor: 5.152
FIGURE 1Conceptual overview of modularity in a network. (A) A schematic network of 10 nodes in two communities (red and blue) connected by binary edges. On the left, the nodes are shown graphically, and on the right, the same schematic network is shown as a connectivity matrix. (B) Examples of modularity as a measure. When there are fewer between-community edges, the modularity measure is higher, interpreted as more segregation.
FIGURE 2Overview of design and methodology. (A) Timeline of tasks performed by participants in this study. The blocks analyzed in this manuscript have been highlighted: resting-state sessions (green) and digit symbol coding tasks (DSC, red). (B) The difference in self-reported state fatigue following the resting-state session (last first) for both groups. (C) Difference in task performance in the DSC task (last-first). Panels (C,D) show data previously reported in Skau et al. (2019). (D) The 44 recording sites on the frontal cortex. These 44 recording sites become nodes in the network. (E) An example connectivity matrix from one resting-state session showing three communities for the 44 nodes depicted in panel (B). Similar to the connectivity matrix in 1A, but with weighted edges instead of binary edges. (F) Descriptive statistics of the community detection properties. Histograms show the number of communities (top) and the number of nodes in the largest community (bottom) for rest (green) and DSC task (red) and both patients and healthy controls.
FIGURE 3Change in modularity over 2.5 h of cognitive activity. Panel (A) shows the change in modularity between the first and last resting-state session. (B) The change in modularity during the first and last Digit Symbol Coding (DSC) task was done at the experiment’s beginning and end. Error bars indicate the standard error of the mean.