Objective: To investigate possible brain markers for PD-MCI by undertaking cognitive task-based and resting-state fMRI.

Background: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is widely recognised as a movement disorder, although non-motor symptoms such as cognitive dysfunction detrimentally impact PD patients’ quality of life and contribute to a high disease burden. PD patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) are at greater risk of developing dementia than PD patients without MCI (PD-NC).

Method: 15 PD-MCI, 26 PD-NC and 22 age and gender-matched healthy controls (HC) were scanned (3T Siemens PRISMA) conducting attentional task (Attention Network Task) and resting state. For task-based fMRI, BOLD activation of three attentional components, alerting, orienting and executive attention were analysed. For resting-state fMRI, seed-based functional connectivity analysis was performed to identify altered connectivity between seeds in the default mode networks (DMN), frontoparietal network (FPN), and dorsal attention network (DAN) to other regions between groups.

Results: Using the attentional task-based fMRI, increased activation of the left cerebellum crus 1 during the alerting condition was observed in PD patients regardless of their cognitive status compared to HC. During resting-state, there was a significant increase in connectivity between the medial prefrontal cortex and bilateral posterior cerebellum in patients with PD-MCI compared to PD-NC and HC.

Conclusion: An increased activation in the posterior cerebellum was observed during both attentional task and resting state fMRI in PD, particularly with respect to MCI. Hypermetabolism in the cerebellum suggest a compensatory mechanism in PD patients to maintain cognitive function. The spread of PD pathology may not be severe enough to cause network disintegration. These findings contribute important new knowledge of the cerebellum involvement during resting state and attentional processing in PD patients at risk of developing dementia. This may facilitate the development of treatment and guidelines for identification of PD-MCI and possible PD with dementia.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/changes-in-the-cerebellar-activity-during-task-based-and-resting-state-fmri-in-parkinsons-disease-patients-with-mild-cognitive-impairment/