Objective: This study aims to clarify the cerebellar roles of resting state networks (RSNs) alterations and functional connectivity (FC) changes with regard to the cognitive performances in patients with Multiple System Atrophy (MSA).

Background: Patients with MSA may show cognitive decline during course of the illness. Striatofrontal deafferentiation is considered to play an important role for cognitive performance in MSA. However, the effect of cerebellar degeneration to the cognition remains elusive.

Methods: Thirty patients with probable MSA and 30 age-, gender-matched healthy controls (HC) were enrolled. All participants were scanned with 3T-MRI. We conducted voxel-based morphometry (VBM) for anatomical images, and independent component analysis (ICA) for functional images to identify the resting-state networks (RSN) related to the cerebellum. Subsequently, we performed seed-based analysis.

Results: In the MSA group, significant cerebellar volume loss was observed compared to HC. ICA and dual-regression analyses with voxel-wise gray matter volume as covariate showed lower functional connectivity (FC) regions of the right and left executive control network (ECN) in the cerebellum in MSA than HC. Seed based analysis showed widely disruption of cerebello-cortical networks between lobule VI/VII and the frontal, parietal, temporal lobes and basal ganglia. Global cognitive scores assessed by ACE-R strongly correlated with FC between right crus I/II and medial prefrontal cortex (r = 0.79, p < 0.0001), and left putamen (r = 0.64, p < 0.0001).

Conclusions: Our study indicates that alterations of cerebello-cortical networks related to the cognitive performance in MSA.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/alterations-of-cerebello-cortical-networks-related-to-the-cognitive-performance-in-multiple-system-atrophy/